Mexico recaptured the worlds top drug lord Joaquin El Chapo Guzman with US help after a pre-dawn shootout on 8 January, six months after he humiliated the government with his second escape from a maximum-security prison. Guzman, head of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, was presented to the media and bundled into a Marines helicopter in the evening, to be flown to the same prison from which he escaped.

He was captured at a roadside motel after an operation that reportedly left five people dead at a safe house in the city of Los Mochis, in the drug barons native north-western state of Sinaloa. Guzman, whose nickname means Shorty, first escaped prison in 2001 by bribing prison officials, and went on to dominate drug trafficking along much of the Rio Grande.

He was recaptured by Mexican President Enrique Pena Nietos government 13 years later but again fled, this time through a mile-long tunnel that burrowed right up into the shower in his cell, capitalising on the drug-tunnelling skills his cartel honed on the US border.

Once featured in the Forbes list of billionaires, Guzman has led a cartel that smuggled billions of dollars of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines into the US and fought vicious turf wars with other Mexican gangs. He now faces the prospect of being tried in the US.