Mexican Authorities Investigate Drug Lord Meeting with Sean Penn

This time around, Mexican officials have said they are willing to extradite Guzman but warn the process could take a year.

“What I can say is we are gratified the capture was successful”.

The clandestine meeting in early October to discuss a Rolling Stone magazine article was essential to finding the fugitive drug lord, Mexico’s attorney general said on Monday.

“If during the dinner El Chapo gave them money, or jewels, or he gave them money for the movie or any other transaction, they could be charged with money laundering”, Barragan y Salvatierra said as reported by the Associated Press. “He did ask me to save whatever conversations we had for the interview … so hopefully that will make the interview interesting”, Rose said, adding, “I don’t think he’ll be doing any other interviews until we sit down”.

“It was obviously expensive, but they knew they had to flush Chapo Guzman out”, said Michael Vigil, former head of global operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration, who also was briefed on the operation. Images released to a Mexican newspaper showed that Penn and Del Castillo were under surveillance. “The first motivation was meeting Kate del Castillo and striking a relationship there”, Vigil said, citing intelligence sources.

Guzman eventually met del Castillo face to face in an undisclosed jungle clearing in October, along with actor and director Sean Penn.

Another text from the drug lord reads: “How is the best and most intelligent woman in the world, who I admire a lot?”

Barabas sells the “Fantasy” shirt, which the company has identified as that worn by Guzman in the photo with Penn. Many Mexican leaders bristled at the thought their jails could not hold Guzman. “Shirt.” In the past, polo shirts like one worn by drug trafficker Edgar Valdez Villarreal, “La Barbie”, gained broad popularity in Mexico.

Milenio said it obtained the transcripts of the texts from a federal official, who also could not be named.

Barragan y Salvatierra said that meeting with Guzman for journalistic purposes would be a solid defense.

But interviews with notorious figures are legitimate aspects of journalism.

Guzman, who has escaped twice from Mexican maximum security prisons and is being sought for extradition by the United States, was recaptured on Friday after a bloody shootout in the city of Los Mochis in his home state of Sinaloa. In the meantime, they plan to take extraordinary measure to prevent a third escape.

Following that meeting, which Mexican authorities had known about, troops entered Guzman’s remote mountain stronghold in northwestern Mexico in order to “spit him out toward a city”, a government official told reporters on condition of anonymity. The billionaire fugitive was recaptured last week.

Juan Pablo Badillo, a lawyer representing drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, attends an interview with Reuters in Mexico City on January 13, 2016.

He escaped from prison for a second time in July via a tunnel that burrowed right up to his cell.