World’s oldest person could be 120-year-old Guatemalan woman

GUATEMALA CITY – A Guatemalan woman who used to pick coffee and tend sheep — and who will turn 121 in November — could be the world’s oldest by far, a national newspaper reported Tuesday.

Juana Chox Yac, who is an indigenous Kaqchikel Maya, was born November 29, 1893 in the farming village of Santa Lucía Utatlán, Sololá department, the report in the daily Siglo 21 said.

As a young woman, she worked picking coffee beans, and tending sheep and goats, before marrying at 15, the newspaper said.

Her first husband died nine years after they were married and their two children have died as well.

Chox Yac, however, remarried at 29 and had seven more children before being widowed again in 1964.

She has a family of 75 relatives including children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, said the report, which published a government document with her birth date.

It was not immediately known if her details have been submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records for verification.

But the report puts her age at four years older than Japan’s Misao Okawa, who turned 116 on March 5 and is the book’s official record holder for longest-lived woman.