TIJUANA – With Osama bin Laden dead, attention is being focused on the man Forbes magazine has now listed as the most wanted criminal in the world: Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.

For years he's already been the most wanted man in Mexico, where he became the top drug lord in 2003. Authorities said he's led a criminal organization responsible for moving multi-ton shipments of cocaine from Central America through Mexico to the United States.

He's also been linked to multiple murders and kidnappings across the country, particularly in the northern states of Baja California, Chihuahua and Sinaloa.

He escaped a decade ago from a prison in Jalisco state and has been sought ever since.

Will the United States now use all its might to capture "El Chapo"?

"No", says former Newsweek editor Malcolm Beith, who has written a book about him. To the United States, the kingpin does not represent a grave risk, he said, nor does it consider him a terrorist like bin Laden.

Beith spoke in Mexico City last week when he presented his book, "The Last Narco: Inside the Hunt for El Chapo, the World's Most Wanted Drug Lord" (Grove Press, 2010).

Joaquín Guzmán was born in 1957 in La Tuna, a hamlet with about 200 people in the municipality of

Badiraguato, in Sinaloa state.

The author writes that Guzmán was the son of poor farmers. He spent his childhood and part of his adolescence working day and night in the field alongside his father, who often beat him and who threw him out of the house before he was 18.

"He always wanted to leave that drama," he writes.

He achieved that goal, eventually building

a "transnational drug empire" and accumulating a personal fortune worth more than $1 billion, making him one of the world's richest persons, according to Forbes.

The late crusading Tijuana journalist Jesús Blancornelas explained in his book "El Cártel" (Random House Mondadori, 2006) that it was Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the head of the Guadalajara cartel, who divided up the nation's drug territories shortly before he was arrested in 1989.

During a meeting of drug lords in Acapulco, Félix Gallardo gave Guzmán control of the Tecate area, his first big break.

In that same meeting, Félix Gallardo, nicknamed "The Godfather," gave Rafael Aguilar Guajardo the territory made up of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua and Nuevo Laredo; Luis Héctor "El Güero" Palma got

San Luis Río Colorado; Emilio Quintero Payán got the Nogales and Hermosillo areas; Jesús "Chuy" Labra Avilés, who was a front for the Arellano Félix, got Tijuana;

Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada and Baltazar Díaz got Sinaloa; and Rafael Chao got Mexicali, according to Blancornelas.

"This distribution of territories meant that other Mexican or foreign traffickers could pass through any given area, but they had to pay a fee to the boss in charge," wrote Blancornelas.

The plan fell apart, however, as bosses competed to be the top one.

They stopped cooperating with one another. "Then came the deadly confrontations, the revenge killings, and the number of executions went up," wrote Blancornelas.

One of the most infamous attacks targeted Guzmán on May 24, 1993, when gunmen working for the Arellano Félix cartel went to kill him at the airport in Guadalajara. Instead, they shot seven people to death, among them Guadalajara Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo.

It's been 22 years since the drug lords met in Acapulco. Some have been killed, others are in prison. Guzmán and Zambada rule the Sinaloa cartel and are fighting to control Mexico's northern drug territories, including Tijuana.

Guzmán's ambitions don't stop there, however. Beith writes that Guzmán has established links with the Italian mafia and criminal organizations in Eastern Europe, Africa, China, Thailand and Vietnam.

Forbes magazine has updated its list of the 10 most wanted criminals in the world after the death of bin Laden. The magazine moved Guzmán to the top spot, followed by Dawood Ibrahim, the head of an Indian crime group; Samion Mogilevich, a Russian mafia boss; Matteo Messina, the maximum leader of the Cosa Nostra; and Ayman al Zawahiri,

the number two man at al-Qaeda.

Omar.millan@sandiegored.com