Rolling Stone has revealed that American actor Sean Penn met and interviewed Mexican drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman in the Mexican jungle.
The meeting, described at length in the magazine’s just published feature, was apparently facilitated by Mexican film star Kate del Castillo, set up through a series of clandestine contacts.
In the article, Penn describes travelling to Mexico via charter flight, surrendering his electronics, and being spirited, via a series of SUVs and prop planes (to scramble military surveillance).
The flight had been just bumpy enough that each of us had taken a few swigs off a bottle of Honor tequila, a new brand that Kate is marketing. I step from plane to earth, ever so slightly sobering my bearings, and move toward the beckoning waves of waiting drivers. I throw my satchel into the open back of one of the SUVs, and lumber over to the tree line to take a piss. Dick in hand, I do consider it among my body parts vulnerable to the knives of irrational narco types, and take a fond last look, before tucking it back into my pants.
Penn also describes his dinner with El Chapo on a mountaintop clearing, surrounded by more than 100 gun-toting guards.
Penn describes El Chapo as having a “warm smile”, and his young crew as being very “clean cut, well-dressed and mannered”, with “no Danny Trejo types” amongst their ranks.
How Penn was able to sit down with the most wanted criminal in the Americas, keeping law enforcements in the dark is significant in itself.
It also marks the first time Guzman has publicly admitted to any kind of criminal activity, previously maintaining to media that he was a “farmer”.
