Recaptured drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s secret interview with US actor Sean Penn helped authorities locate his whereabouts, a Mexican law enforcement official said late Saturday.
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The engineers who built the tunnel were flown to Germany for specialized training, Penn said Guzman told him.
But he also highlighted the extraordinary measures taken to protect Guzman, including flying Penn and his team aboard a plane that had a device that jams radar and ensuring they did not have their phones. “We are the consumers, and as such, we are complicit in every murder, and in every corruption of an institution’s ability to protect the quality of life for citizens of Mexico and the United States that comes as a result of our insatiable appetite for illicit narcotics”.
Guzman was captured on January 8 after six months of being on the run.
Asked about who is to blame for drug trafficking, Guzman is quoted as saying: “If there was no consumption, there would be no sales”.
Attorney General Arely Gomez said that an important aspect of his recapture “was discovering Guzman’s intention to have a biographic film made”.
Guzman, who has escaped prison twice, himself said he didn’t believe his business had been impacted by his last spell in prison.
In writing for Rolling Stone, Penn described how Guzman opened Kate del Castillo’s door and greeted her “like a daughter returning from college”.
The official said the meeting between Penn and Guzman was held in Tamazula, a community in Durango state that neighbors Sinaloa, home of Guzman’s drug cartel.
A White House spokesman said the Hollywood actor’s “so-called interview” was “maddening”, while Republican Marco Rubio said it was “grotesque”.
On the topic of his own mortality, he said he hoped to die of “natural causes” – not in a shootout.
Guzman, 58, escaped from a Mexican maximum security prison through a tunnel in July, eluding his pursuers until his capture in the seaside town of Los Mochis after a raid that left five people dead.
There were immediately calls for his quick extradition, just as there were after the February 2014 capture of Guzman, who faces drug-trafficking charges in several USA states. Penn said some of Guzman’s henchmen were certified as lawyers to allow them access to the boss while he was in prison.
He also escaped a different maximum-security facility in 2001 while serving a 20-year sentence.
“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.
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His exchange with the notorious fugitive, whose organisation has smuggled billions of dollars of drugs into the USA, has been published by Rolling Stone magazine.
