A look at the extradition process for “El Chapo” Guzman

An “essential” factor in Guzman’s eventual arrest was the drug lord’s meeting with Hollywood star Sean Penn in Guzman’s remote mountaintop hideout in the Mexican state of Durango in early October, Mexico’s attorney general Arely Gomez said on Monday.

Guzman told Penn in an interview published on Saturday by Rolling Stone magazine that he felt neither remorse nor responsibility for smuggling billions of dollars worth of drugs into the United States.

“No, you’re reading hits”, he said in the email exchange with the AP.

A disclaimer on the article says it was submitted to Guzman for approval before publication, a practice that several renowned journalists and professional organizations have criticized.

Now Mexican officials say they want to question both Penn and del Castillo.

From there, dozens more questions emerge: Who is del Castillo, and why did she have a hand in all of this? Mexican authorities had said they captured Guzman partly because his representatives contacted filmmakers and actors about making his biopic. “We very much regret the acts of any citizen who collaborates with organized crime, because many times drug traffickers have been stereotyped as people who have their good side, or who in some way do good things”.

It was not Penn’s first foray into Latin American life and politics.

Del Castillo first rose to fame starring in telenovelas, but English-speaking viewers may know her from her roles in the movies “Under the Same Moon”, “The 33”, and “Bordertown”. He has also been widely hailed for the charity he founded in Haiti after its devastating 2010 natural disaster.

A dozen prison officials have been arrested over the escape.

Meanwhile, the media were granted access on Monday to the house where Guzman was holed up before his capture last week.

Barabas, a California-based company, posted the Rolling Stone image on its website – alongside a model wearing the identical shirt – with a “Most Wanted” banner. “With this action, 98 of the 122 most unsafe criminals no longer present a threat to society and we are going for all of them”.

A Mexican official told CNN the pictures are legitimate and were taken by Mexican intelligence teams. They also found two women cowering in one of the home’s five bathrooms.

Guzman is back in the same maximum-security prison from which he escaped. The tunnel extended for about a mile underground and featured an adapted motorcycle on rails that officials believe was used to transport the tools used to create the tunnel, Monte Alejandro Rubido, the head of the Mexican national security commission, said in July.

On Monday, the prison was ringed by soldiers, some riding in armored personnel carrier, as well as marines and federal police.

A month before he escaped, USA authorities had sought his extradition.

President Enrique Pena Nieto’s office and the attorney general’s office didn’t respond to attempts by The Associated Press to confirm the number, but others who had been briefed said it was at least 2,500.