DHAKA: A meeting between US actor Sean Penn and Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman in the Mexican jungle helped lead to the drug kingpin's capture this week.
A Mexican official said Saturday, asiaone.com publishes this report on Sunday (January 10).
The US rock magazine posted online on Saturday an interview between Penn and Guzman as well as an October 2 picture showing the Oscar-winning actor shaking hands with the mustachioed Sinaloa drug cartel leader, who is wearing a blue shirt.
Penn writes that the 58-year-old Guzman gave him a ‘compadre’ hug when they met at a Mexican jungle clearing and had a seven-hour sitdown followed by phone and video interviews.
‘I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world,’ Guzman told Penn in a stunning admission of his criminal enterprise over sips of tequila.
‘I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats,’ Guzman said in the meeting, which Mexican actress Kate del Castillo helped to arrange.
A Mexican federal official told the media that authorities ‘had knowledge of this meeting’ and that it helped lead to Friday’s recapture of the world’s most wanted man in his northwestern home state of Sinaloa.
Mexican Attorney General Arely Gomez said on Friday that Guzman had met with unnamed actors and producers in the hope of making a biopic about himself, which helped locate him.
Rolling Stone also published a video showing Guzman without a mustache, talking about why he decided to go into drug trafficking after the age of 15 because there were ‘no job opportunities’.
‘Unfortunately, where I grew up, there was and there is no other way to survive,’ Guzman said.
In the Rolling Stone video interview, Guzman is asked about the belief that Mexican authorities want to kill him instead of taking him alive.
He responds, ‘No, I think that if they find me they will arrest me. Of course’.
The world’s most wanted drug baron was arrested after a deadly military raid on a house early Friday (January 8) in Los Mochis, a coastal city in his native northwestern state of Sinaloa.
Five suspects died and one marine was wounded in the raid. Six people were detained in the operation.
BDST: 1359 HRS, JAN 10, 2016
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