Mexico has recaptured the world’s most notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman six months after he brazenly broke out of a maximum security prison through a mile-long tunnel, President Enrique Pena Nieto said on Friday.
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The encounter took place in October, as Mexican authorities searched for Guzman following his escape from a maximum-security prison in July, Penn wrote.
A Mexican marine inspects a manhole where high-powered weapons were found to be abandoned, in the neighborhood where special forces had located the world’s most-wanted drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, in Los Mochis, Mexico, Saturday, Jan. 9, 2016.
“And one thing I will tell you is that this braggadocios action about how much heroin he sends around the world, including to the United States, is maddening”, McDonough told Jake Tapper.
“I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats”, Guzman said in the meeting, which Mexican actress Kate del Castillo helped to arrange.
“Today, I believe more in Chapo Guzman that in the governments that hide painful truths from me, who hide the cure for cancer, for AIDS, etc, for their own benefit and wealth”, Del Castillo tweeted in 2012.
About the perceived risk of interviewing one of the world’s most wanted drug lords, Penn said he took comfort in knowing that “unlike many of his counterparts …”
Asked about his business, El Chapo responded: “It’s a reality that drugs destroy”.
There’s a new development in the arrest of escaped Mexican drug lord “El Chapo”.
Penn also recounted how Guzman voiced interest in the movie business and how it works, but was unimpressed with its financial yield.
Mexico aims to extradite Guzman to the United States as soon as possible.
More than a dozen prison and federal police officials have been arrested on charges of helping Guzman flee, along with several associates of the drug lord who worked from the outside on building the tunnel. Guzman’s downfall, the AP reports, came about courtesy of that September interview after authorities were able to track him to rural Durango state; a law enforcement official tells the AP that officials held their fire at the time because Guzman was with two women and a child, but that they later tracked him to the house in Los Mochis where he was nabbed.
In the video interview, Guzman is asked whether Mexican authorities want to kill him instead of taking him alive. Because no one has ever had this type of access to El Chapo before.
On Friday Mexico authorities said his communications with producers and actors helped lead them to the drug lord.
Mexican government sources said Penn and del Castillo “are under investigation for their “interview” with Guzman”, according to ABC News.
“Well, it poses a lot of very interesting questions both for him and for others involved in this-so-called interview, so we’ll see what happens on that – I’m not gonna get ahead of it”, McDonough said.
Then Guzman escaped on July 11 under the noses of guards and prison officials at Mexico’s most secure lock-up, slipping out an elaborate tunnel that showed the depth of the country’s corruption while thoroughly embarrassing Pena Nieto’s administration.
It’s a process that could take months.
Guzman was first caught in Guatemala in 1993 and extradited to Mexico.
The Mexican attorney general said extradition proceedings are set to begin, but she did not say when.
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While describing the granting of copy approval to Guzman as “indefensible”, MSNBC host Christopher Hayes said it was naive to say the magazine should not run the interview. I think he made movies a long time ago or something …
