Pedestrian Daily
The saga of Mexican drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman gets deeper and stranger, with a reveal by Rolling Stone that actor Sean Penn met with the escaped convict at an “undisclosed location” in the Mexican jungle, for a seven-hour interview on their behalf.
This particular meeting, described in depth in the magazine’s just-published feature, was apparently facilitated by Mexican film star Kate del Castillo, set up through a series of clandestine contacts, and conducted at some point last October.
In the article, Penn describes travelling to Mexico via charter flight, surrendering his electronics, and being spirited, via a series of SUVs and prop planes (decked out with gear to scramble military surveillance), to El Chapo’s location.
Penn describes his feelings thusly:
The flight had been just bumpy enough that each of us had taken a few swigs off a bottle of Honor tequila, a new brand that Kate is marketing. I step from plane to earth, ever so slightly sobering my bearings, and move toward the beckoning waves of waiting drivers. I throw my satchel into the open back of one of the SUVs, and lumber over to the tree line to take a piss. Dick in hand, I do consider it among my body parts vulnerable to the knives of irrational narco types, and take a fond last look, before tucking it back into my pants.
After one last leg of the journey, involving an hours-long dirt track drive into the jungle, Penn describes coming face to face with El Chapo in a mountaintop clearing, and eating dinner with him, surrounded by upwards of 100 gun-toting guards.
This section forms the meat of the story, and for what it’s worth, Penn describes El Chapo as having a “warm smile”, and his young crew as being very “clean cut, well-dressed and mannered”, with “no Danny Trejo types” amongst their ranks.
The interview is significant for a number of reasons, not least of all because a Hollywood film star was somehow able to sit down the most wanted criminal in the Americas when major law enforcement agencies were in the dark.
It also marks the first time that Guzman has publicly admitted to any kind of criminal activity, having maintained to the media that he is a “farmer” in the past. Via the New York Times:
Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, started out in business not long after turning 6, selling oranges and soft drinks. By 15, he said in an interview conducted in a jungle clearing by the actor and director Sean Penn for Rolling Stone magazine, he had begun to grow marijuana and poppies because there was no other way for his impoverished family to survive.Now, unapologetically, he said: “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats.”Though his fortune, estimated at $1 billion, has come with a trail of blood, he does not consider himself a violent man. “Look, all I do is defend myself, nothing more,” he told Mr. Penn. “But do I start trouble? Never.”
Mexican authorities say that El Chapo’s capture this past Friday was, in part, due to intelligence they’d gathered that he had been contacting various filmmakers with a view to making a film about his life.
Whether Sean Penn and Rolling Stone played an inadvertent part in this – and how the Mexican government will react to the fact that an American celebrity was literally hanging out, eating tacos with their most wanted man – remains to be seen.
Also, Danny Trejo may want to have words with Sean Penn at some point, but that’s a separate issue.
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