Sean Penn & Kate del Castillo Scooped the Press and Embarrassed the US & Mexican Governments in Interview with Chapo Guzmán
Oscar winner Sean Penn and Mexican film and TV star Kate del Castillo recently played starring roles as citizen journalists and scooped the world’s major media outlets by scoring a sit-down interview with notorious Mexican narco-trafficker: Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera (aka Chapo Guzmán).
As one of the longtime leaders of the powerful Sinaloa drug-trafficking organization, Guzmán has been on the run from law enforcers for years — having previously twice escaped from high-security Mexican prisons.
Penn said in a recent interview with CBS News that the story he authored for Rolling Stone magazine earlier this month based on the visit with Guzmán was intended to spur a deeper discussion about drug-war policy. Instead, it drew a round of cackles from major U.S. media machines like the Washington Post, which characterized Penn’s first-person account as being self-absorbed and an insult to the dozens of Mexican journalists who have been murdered covering the drug war.
Boiled down, the argument advanced by the Washington Post and echoed by other media outlets seems to be that because Penn and del Castillo were not tortured or killed by Guzmán and his associates, or at least threatened with bodily harm, then they couldn’t possibly be real journalists — and consequently Penn’s Rolling Stone story simply can’t be taken seriously.
To make matters worse for Penn and del Castillo, the Mexican government is trying to paint a target on their backs by announcing that Mexican law enforcers were monitoring Penn and del Castillo’s communications with Guzmán. That surveillance, Mexico’s attorney general claims, was key to leading Mexican Marines to the drug traffickers’ secret hideout in the mountain jungles that straddle the border between the Mexican states of Durango and Sinaloa — a region in northwestern Mexico that is part of the so-called Golden Triangle, so named for its copious production of marijuana and heroin.
The claims by both U.S. media outlets and the Mexican government in justifying their attacks on Penn and del Castillo, however, don’t stand up to the sanitizing effects of sunshine.
String of Coincidences
Penn and del Castillo met with Guzmán this past October in a jungle clearing somewhere in the mountains of Mexico. That meeting, and a series of follow-up interviews conducted via BlackBerry Messenger and video, became fodder for a Rolling Stone story published online on Jan. 9 of this year.
A few days after the Oct. 2, 2015, meeting between Penn, del Castillo and Guzmán, Mexican forces laid siege to some 13 mountain communities in the Tamazula municipality of Durango, Mexico, in pursuit of Guzmán, who managed to escape the law’s clutches, but not before some 700 residents were forced to flee their homes due to the Mexican military’s assault on the area, according to press reports.
Mexican Marines finally caught up with Guzmán on Friday, Jan. 8, 2016, in the Mexican city of Los Mochis, far away from the security of his mountain hideout and the protection of his mercenary army, estimated to number in the 100s. Guzmán was apprehended a short distance from a house in that Pacific coast community that was stormed by a relatively small team of some 17 Mexican Marines, according to news reports. Five of Guzmán’s guards allegedly were killed in the raid and another six arrested — representing a small fraction of his much larger, well-armed security entourage.
In a case of coincidence being stranger than fiction, the Rolling Stone print edition featuring the Guzmán story was shipped to the press on Friday, Jan. 8, 2016 — the same day the fugitive was recaptured — but wasn’t slated to reach the newsstands until the following Friday. Had Penn’s story hit the streets before Guzmán’s apprehension, it would have undoubtedly proven very embarrassing to law-enforcement agencies on both sides of the border…
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You can read the complete investigative report here @ NarcoNews