El Chapo, Mexican Drug Lord, Met With Sean Penn Before His Arrest - Us Weekly

 “No, that is false, because the day...

I don’t exist,

it’s not going to decrease in any way at all.”

~(El Chapo:  Mexican Drug Lord)~

El Chapo, Mexican Drug Lord, Met With Sean Penn Before His Arrest - Us Weekly:  According to the interview, Penn, 55, sat down to chat with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman last fall after he made contact with the drug kingpin through Mexican actress Kate del Castillo.

“At four years old, in '64, I was digging for imaginary treasures, unneeded, in my parents' middleclass American backyard while he was hand-drawing fantasy pesos that, if real, might be the only path for he and his family to dream beyond peasant farming,” Penn wrote in the far-reaching piece. “And while I was surfing the waves of Malibu at age nine, he was already working in the marijuana and poppy fields of the remote mountains of Sinaloa, Mexico. Today, he runs the biggest international drug cartel the world has ever known, exceeding even that of Pablo Escobar.”

At one point in the interview, Guzman tells Penn that he supplies “more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world,” adding that he owns “a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats.”

Sean Penn attends the 5th Annual Sean Penn & Friends 

HELP HAITI HOME 

Gala on January 9, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California

But, when asked whether he thinks he is to blame for the high drug addiction rates around the world, Guzman responds honestly, “No, that is false, because the day I don’t exist, it’s not going to decrease in any way at all.”

El Chapo sees himself as a businessman, as someone who took advantage of the only opportunities he had to support himself and his family, and his place in the drug business as ultimately replaceable—the demand will always be there, and so will the supply.

A Mexican federal law enforcement official later told the Associated Press that Penn’s interview was what eventually led authorities straight to Guzman. (The drug lord was arrested on Friday, January 8, six months after he escaped a maximum security prison.)  

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The actor was exacting in his strategy.

“I could not sell [Guzmán ] on a bait-and-switch,” Penn writes, “and I knew that in the writing of any piece, my only genuine cards to play were to expose myself as one fascinated and willing to suspend judgment.”

This unconventional approach toward a man charged with organized crime, murder and drug trafficking in a number of U.S. jurisdictions apparently won the day. Guzmán agreed to a formal interview with Penn and even let slip a sentimental tidbit about his mother.

He sees her “all the time,” he tells Penn. “I hoped we would meet at my ranch and you could meet my mother. She knows me better than I do.”

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