MEXICO CITY (AP) — Much like the late Osama bin Laden, the man the U.S. calls the world’s most powerful drug lord apparently has been hiding in plain sight.

Mexican federal police nearly nabbed Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in a coastal mansion in Los Cabos three weeks ago, barely a day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with dozens of other foreign ministers in the same southern Baja peninsula
resort town.

José Cuitláhuac Salinas, Mexico’s assistant attorney general in charge of organized crime investigations, confirmed on Sunday that there was a near miss in late February in the government’s efforts to arrest the man who has become one of the world’s top fugitives since he escaped prison in a laundry truck in 2001.

“We know he was there,” Salinas told The Associated Press.

The incident fuels growing speculation that authorities are closing in on Guzmán, and that the government of President Felipe Calderón is determined to grab him before his six-year term ends in December.

Calderón can’t be re-elected, and his National Action Party is trailing in the polls ahead of the July 1 presidential vote. Many Mexicans say they are weary of his government’s assault on organised crime that has left more than 47,000 dead and Guzmán stronger than ever. The arrest of the top capo likely would be a political boon to the ruling party.

Two men and two women in the house where Guzmán allegedly had been staying were detained and are in the custody of the attorney general’s organised crime unit, Salinas said. He did not release their names but said at least one of the men served as a pilot for Guzmán. Federal police also found arms in the house, Salinas said, but he did not offer details.

The raid was led by Mexican authorities. Salinas would not say if the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had any involvement. The DEA referred all comment to the Mexican government.

Since his prison escape, Guzmán, 54, has transformed himself from a middling Mexican capo into what the U.S. Treasury Department calls the world’s most powerful drug trafficker.

Calderón’s government says it doesn’t rank the 15 cartel leaders on its most-wanted list, but Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel controls trafficking in nearly half of Mexico. Much of the rest of the country is in the hands of the Zetas cartel.

U.S. law enforcement officials say no other cartel has the international cocaine distribution networks of Sinaloa, which is also making a major push into methamphetamines in Mexico and Central America. Guzmán appears annually on the Forbes magazine list of the world’s billionaires, and also has been named by the magazine as one of the world’s most powerful people.

He has a $7 million bounty on his head in Mexico and the U.S., and teams of law enforcement agents from both countries are devoted to his capture.

Guzmán is often rumoured to be hiding in the remote hills of his home state of Sinaloa, or in other locations, including Argentina for a time. Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina said he has reports that Guzmán has been in his country recently as well.

One U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks quoted Mexican Defense Secretary, Gen. Guillermo Galván Galván, as saying that Guzmán moves frequently among 10 to 15 locations to avoid arrest, and has a security detail of up to 300 men.

Salinas said he didn’t know if this time Guzmán was in the house with only four other people and lacked the expected entourage of bodyguards and surveillance equipment, which reportedly normally includes helicopters. He would not give details of how the operation was carried out or what the four may have told authorities.

“That’s classified information,” he said.

Rumours also surface regularly that police have shown up in various hideouts just as Guzmán is escaping out the back door. Law enforcement and military have said they were close before, including raiding a remote Sinaloa town where Guzmán got married in 2007 hours after the wedding.

His narrow escapes raise the suspicion that he could be getting tipped off, including this time.

A series of bus burnings and ‘narco’ road blocks in Guadalajara on Friday fueled new talk that authorities had captured Guzmán. The commotion instead was related to the arrest of a leader of a smaller cartel, the New Generation, believed to be aligned with Guzmán.

“We’re still searching,” Salinas said. When asked if authorities are close, he just smiled.

Salinas wouldn’t say when federal police received the intelligence that Guzmán was in one of several exclusive subdivisions of million-dollar homes between the Cabo San Lucas Highway and the beach. The operation ran several days starting on Feb. 21, just as the city had been filled with top security and foreign ministers meeting in advance of the June G20 countries, which will also be held in Los Cabos.

Salinas said he did not know the exact location of the house where the operation took place. But municipal police commander Alfonso Meza said it is located in the exclusive Punta Ballena development overlooking the Gulf of California. The home is still sealed off by the attorney general’s office and the organized crime division, he said.

The Calderón administration has long been accused of protecting Guzmán as it carried out major hits on his enemies, dismantling the rival Arellano Felix and Beltrán Leyva cartels and taking out top leaders of the Gulf Cartel. But more recently, the Calderón government has come up with major hits on Sinaloa. In the last six months, it has netted Guzmán’s major methamphetamine manufacturer, a major cocaine shipper and Guzmán’s security chief, seizing computer files and other valuable data.

Los Cabos, at the tip of Baja peninsula, is considered one of the safest locations in Mexico, a favorite vacation spot among Hollywood stars and thousands of U.S. tourists who still venture to Mexican beaches despite the violence that plagues much of the country.

But the peninsula also has been frequented by drug lords. Federal police arrested one of Mexico’s most violent drug traffickers, Teodoro García Simental, known as “El Teo,” two years ago in the home he owned in La Paz, north of

Los Cabos.

The U.S. Coast Guard in 2006 arrested Francisco Javier Arellano Félix, head of the Tijuana-based Arellano Félix gang, as he was sport fishing off the coast of Los Cabos.

Osama bin Laden, the United States’ most wanted man for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, was killed by commandos last May in his compound an upscale suburb of Islamabad, Pakistan.

Like Guzmán, many had speculated he was hiding out in rugged mountains. Instead, he was found a short distance from the country’s main military academy.