MEXICO: Fame has been tough on Mexico's three lost and found fishermen. They started out as national heroes, lauded after their rescue last week for supposedly surviving 9½ months adrift in the Pacific Ocean with only rainwater, raw fish and uncooked seagulls to sustain them.
Since then, everything about their story has been questioned. They've even had to fend off widely broadcast and published speculation that they might be killers or cannibals or drug dealers, or all three.
Ruben Aguilar, a spokesman for Mexican president Vicente Fox, said that all aspects of the saga would be investigated, particularly the deaths of two men who were also aboard the boat.
But sources in Mr Fox's administration said that there was no evidence the men were drug traffickers and that no investigation into drug-related accusations had been opened. "Poor guys," a top aide of Mr Fox said. "They survived all that, now they have to deal with all this."
With each new bit of innuendo, each juicy new detail, Mexico is growing more riveted to the saga. The faces of Salvador Ordonez, Jesus Eduardo Vidana and Lucio Rendon flicker across television screens and gleam out from newspaper front pages.
Their journey from anonymity to instant celebrity began inauspiciously. They said they set off in October in an eight-metre boat from San Blas, a small Mexican fishing village north of Puerto Vallarta. Their shark-fishing trip was supposed to last a few days.
They were swept out to sea, they said, and their boat ran out of fuel. Months passed without any word. Back home, they were given up for dead.
Their families' prayers were answered on August 15th, when the crew of another fishing boat spotted their disabled craft. The men were sunburned and thin, but otherwise in remarkable shape after having drifted almost halfway to Australia.
Then they revealed that two men - the boat's owner, identified only as senor Juan, and another man - had died during their odyssey. They said the men had starved to death. But the explanation has fallen flat.
Mexican radio and television have been filled with theories that the men killed their colleagues and ate their flesh.