Security forces say United States actor’s report on Guzman in Rolling Stone tipped them off; Mexico willing to extradite drug lord to the USMEXICO CITY The recapture of drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman took a surprise, Hollywood twist with a Mexican official saying security forces located the whereabouts of the world’s most-wanted trafficker, thanks to a secret interview with U.S. actor Sean Penn.
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Guzman, nicknamed “Chapo” which means “Shorty”, was finally recaptured on Friday in the northern city of Los Mochis after a bloody action movie-like shootout. The Mexican authorities said Friday night that Guzman had been caught partly because he had been planning a movie about his life and had contacted actors and producers, which had helped the authorities to track him down.
Security officials have told the media the encounter helped lead them to a rural part of Durango state in October, where they attacked but failed to capture Guzman.
They aborted their raid at the time because he was with two women and child.
Penn’s article on Guzman was published late Saturday by Rolling Stone magazine, a day after the drug lord’s recapture.
In the interview, Guzman defends his work at the head of the world’s biggest drug trafficking organization, one blamed for thousands of killings.
The Mexican film and television star, who is the daughter of soap opera actor Eric del Castillo, stated that she would trust El Chapo if it was a question between him or the seemingly corrupt Mexican government.
McDonough said Guzman’s boast to Penn about his trafficking exploits “is maddening”.
Then-Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said the extradition would happen only after he finished his sentence in Mexico in “300 or 400 years”. Penn, reminding him of the gun battle that killed another famous drug lord, Colombia’s Pablo Escobar, asked Guzman how he sees his final days in the drug business.
“I think the case to be made privately is ‘fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”, said Andrew Porter, now in private practice.
“I’m going to go into hiding”.
A senior Obama administration official called the Mexican drug lord’s boasts about his heroin empire “maddening” but would not comment on repercussions for Penn. But unlike bin Laden, who had posed the ludicrous premise that a country’s entire population is defined by – and therefore complicit in – its leadership’s policies, with the world’s most wanted drug lord, are we, the American public, not indeed complicit in what we demonize?
“There’s nothing illegitimate about pursuing an interview with (Guzman)”, Adams said. The story provides new details on his dramatic escape from prison last summer, when he disappeared through a hole in his shower into a mile-long tunnel that some engineers estimated took more than a year and at least $1 million to build. The engineers, Penn wrote, had been flown to Germany for specialised training.
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According to a statement from the Mexican Attorney General’s office, the USA filed extradition requests June 25, while Guzman was in custody, and another Sep. The actress says she has received “private intimidations” for her public views from “high-ranking officials” in Mexico, and no doubt her declarations put her on their watch list. “Each year corrupt politicians steal over 500 billion pesos (about US$30 billion) and only those who don’t have money to buy their innocence or who no longer serves goal are persecuted an punished”. “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”.
