He met in October with Guzman, who had been on the run since escaping from a Mexican maximum security prison previous year.
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After all, it was the Oscar-winning actor/director’s carefully arranged clandestine meeting with Joaquin Guzman (Loera), better known as “El Chapo”, that led Mexican authorities to the head of the vicious Sinaloa cartel in his fortified hideout in the “Golden Triangle” region of that Mexican state.
“One, El Chapo stopped being clandestine”.
Guzman, 57, was arrested in the northern city of Los Mochis on Friday, six months after a dramatic second jailbreak through a tunnel in his cell.
Del Castillo’s representatives did not respond to email requests to comment on the texts.
In the messages, even Guzman recognizes that Mexican or USA intelligence officials were probably following or monitoring numerous people who knew him.
Penn stressed that he doesn’t think his communications were tracked, and in an interview with a local radio station, Mexican Attorney General Arely Gomez said that Mexican investigators were following the movements of one of Guzman’s lawyers, not necessarily Penn or del Castillo.
Del Castillo sparked uproar in 2012 when she wrote on Twitter that she believes “more in Chapo Guzman than the governments”.
In the photographs, Penn, wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap, is shown arriving with del Castillo at an airport, then at a hotel, and greeting the men who apparently took them to a small airstrip, from which they flew to the jungle camp to meet Guzman.
Penn, in an article published by Rolling Stone magazine on Saturday, said del Castillo had been in contact with Guzman while he was in prison through letters after the kingpin’s attorney approached her.
She later said that her messages to Guzman were “ironic” but Penn wrote in Rolling Stone that the kingpin sought to send her flowers afterwards. Federal officials also said they had detected recent efforts to register “El Chapo Guzman” as a commercial trademark, possibly by the drug lord’s lawyers. Badillo filed seven previously during Guzman’s incarceration and after his escape.
Mexican federal officials have confirmed that the drug lord appears to have been infatuated with the actress.
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President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government says it plans to extradite Guzman to the United States, where he is wanted on an array of charges including drug trafficking, but officials have cautioned the process could take anything from 1-5 years. And when Mexican marines raided the house where he had been hiding, they found injectable testosterone, a treatment sometimes used to boost the male libido.
