Sean Penn interview helped find drug lord

Top officials in the party of President Enrique Pena Nieto also floated the idea of extradition, which they had flatly ruled out before Guzman’s embarrassing escape from Mexico’s top maximum security prison on July 11 – his second from a Mexican prison.

On Sunday, Interpol served two extradition warrants, the Mexican attorney general’s office said, kick-starting the latest attempt to have Guzman face USA justice for the hundreds of tonnes of cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin he has exported across the border.

Guzman is charged with smuggling vast amounts of drugs into several USA states.

Guzman, who was named Public Enemy Number One by the Chicago Crime Commission in 2013, has been indicted by at least seven United States federal district courts.

His attorney has vowed to challenge the extradition.

“He shouldn’t be extradited because Mexico has a fair Constitution”, Badillo told reporters outside the Altiplano prison near Mexico City, where Guzman was sent following his arrest. A tank is stationed outside the prison.

Analysts say the government should extradite Guzman instead of taking the risk of losing him again.

To land the interview, Penn says, he rode “on the coattails of El Chapo’s faith in Kate”, the Mexican soap opera star who once played a drug baron and had caught Guzman’s attention.

“That can take weeks or months, and that delays the extradition”, he said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment.

Rolling Stone touted the interview via Twitter Sunday, posting “Read Sean Penn’s account of his secret visit with El Chapo, before the drug lord’s recapture”.

“It poses a lot of very interesting questions both for him and for others involved in this-so-called interview, so we’ll see what happens on that – I’m not going to get ahead of it”, McDonough told CNN.

Penn secretly interviewed Guzman in October when the fugitive drug kingpin was being hunted by authorities following his jail break in July, according to an article the actor published Saturday in Rolling Stone magazine.

Guzman was recaptured Friday in the city of Los Mochis in his home state of Sinaloa after a shootout that killed five of his associates and wounded one marine.

Attorney General Arely Gomez said on Friday that Guzman had met with unnamed actors and producers to discuss making a biopic about himself and that it was part of a “new line of investigation”.

According to sources, Penn will not face any legal charges over the interview.

There’s a man from right here in New Mexico who has really become the authority on all things “El Chapo”.

Marco Rubio, one of the Republicans standing for his party’s nomination for the White House, summed up the interview as “grotesque”.

Marty Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, posted a link to an investigative story on how drug traffickers bully journalists into censorship.

As it turns out, authorities in the area used Sean’s interview to help them refine their search for the cartel boss, so they were better able to track him.