Sean Penn’s Interview With Cartel Boss El Chapo Leads To Capture

– A Mexican law enforcement official said late Saturday that drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s secret interview with actor Sean Penn for Rolling Stone magazine helped authorities locate his whereabouts.

Guzman was recaptured early Friday when the Mexican navy raided a home in the coastal city of Los Mochis, where he was protected by many local residents who revered him as a modern Robin Hood.

Mexican authorities said they captured Guzman partly because he or his representatives contacted filmmakers and actors about making his biopic.

Penn’s long and often rambling essay, widely mocked on social media, included comments from Guzman on everything from his childhood to his thoughts on the drug trade.

But in his bombshell article for Rolling Stone on Saturday, Penn wrote that a lawyer for Guzman contacted her after reading her statement on Twitter.

It was also unclear whether USA and Mexican authorities were investigating Del Castillo, who lives in Los Angeles and reportedly has US citizenship.

Defense attorney Juan Pablo Badillo Soto wouldn’t say that Guzman’s escape from prison in July was legal, but “he was seeking freedom and “my obligation as professional is to demonstrate his innocence”. “I didn’t even know he was still around”. But Mike Vigil, a former senior official at the US Drug Enforcement Administration, said Penn is unlikely to face charges.

In the Rolling Stone article, Penn wrote that Guzman was interested in having a movie filmed on his life.

The extradition process could take months, and Guzman’s lawyers are expected to fight it.

“We are seeing an epidemic of heroin and opioid abuse in this country”, McDonough said on ABC’s “This Week“.

The drug lord reached out to the star after she tweeted a message revealing her support for Guzman over the Mexican government.

The meeting was made possible because Guzman struck up an unlikely friendship with Del Castillo, who herself played a Mexican drug queen in a well-known TV soap.

The New York Post tabloid summed up the situation by reposting a now famous photo of Guzman and Penn shaking hands, with the sentence “El Chapo, meet El Jerko”, underneath. The world’s most-wanted drug lord…

The Rolling Stone interview emerged after Mexican prosecutors announced that they would start proceedings to extradite Guzman to the United States, a reversal from President Enrique Pena Nieto’s refusal to send him across the border.

Extraditing Guzman would be an about-face for the government, which has in the past resisted efforts to extradite the drug lord as a matter of sovereignty.

Guzman was taken to Mexico City and, late Friday night, paraded before the cameras wearing blue track trousers and his signature mustache, en route to the same prison he escaped from in July, the maximum security facility Altiplano. Mexican forces used helicopter gunships to attack Guzman’s ranch during a siege that lasted days.

There were immediately calls for his quick extradition, just as there were after the February 2014 capture of Guzman, who faces drug-trafficking charges in several USA states.

In the article, Penn describes the elaborate security measures he took ahead of the clandestine meeting. But unlike bin Laden, who had posed the ludicrous premise that a country’s entire population is defined by – and therefore complicit in – its leadership’s policies, with the world’s most wanted drug lord, are we, the American public, not indeed complicit in what we demonize? Five suspects were killed and six others arrested. Guzman and his security chief fled through the city’s drainage system, but they were caught later after they stole a auto.