Kate del Castillo was the golden ticket for Sean Penn.
“WOULDN’T it be cool if you started trafficking with love?”
That was the bizarre online musing of a famous Mexican actress to the country’s most notorious drug lord. And it was a message that could end up marking the beginning of the end for Joaquin Guzman, known as El Chapo.
He wasn’t trafficking in love but rather untold tonnes of narcotics, guns, money and even humans. But the online message was enough to spark up an unlikely friendship between the boss of Mexico’s Sinoloa cartel and its author, actress Kate del Castillo.
Ironically, Ms del Castillo is famous for playing a drug lord in Mexico’s popular soap opera La Reina del Sur but her latest role has brought her unprecedented global notoriety — she is the woman who arranged the meeting between Hollywood actor Sean Penn and El Chapo.
For the man who had recently escaped from a Mexican prison through an elaborate system of tunnels, a deep level of trust in those around him was absolutely paramount — and he placed that trust in Ms del Castillo.
“He was interested in seeing the story of his life told on film, but would entrust its telling only to Kate,” Penn wrote in his controversial Rolling Stone article.
So it was with her blessing and connections that the Hollywood actor was able to negotiate his way into the belly of the beast.
Sean Penn secretly interviewed 'El Chapo' before his recapture — Photo Supplied Twitter The HillSource:Supplied
THE QUEEN OF THE SOUTH
Arguably the biggest star in Mexican film, Kate del Castillo has shared the big screen with the likes of Jennifer Lopez and played a shady Mexican politician in the hit US series Weeds.
She is known as “the queen of the south” and in her 2012 message to her 2.6 million Twitter followers, she professed a fascination with El Chapo saying she believed in him more than a corrupt Mexican government.
“Today I believe more in El Chapo Guzman than in the governments that hide the truth from me even though it is painful,” she said in a letter posted to Twitter.
“Mr ‘Chapo,’ wouldn’t it be cool that you started trafficking with love? With cures for diseases, with food for the homeless children, with ALCOHOL for the retirement homes that don’t let the elderly spend the rest of the days doing whatever the f**k they want. Imagine trafficking with corrupt politicians instead of women and children who end up as slaves. Why don’t you burn all those whore houses where women are worth less than a pack of cigarettes? Without offer there’s no demand. COME ON Don! You would be the HERO of HEROES! Let’s traffic with love. YOU KNOW HOW TO. Life is a business, and the only thing that changes is the merchandise. Don’t you agree?”
In the online ramblings she also revealed herself as a cancer and AIDS truther, claiming the government conceals a cure in order to keep making profit.
The letter was the source of huge controversy in Mexico, as the actress drew criticism for supporting the actions of a mass murderer — a peculiar position given that in 2009 she was appointed as Ambassador for the Mexican Commission on Human Rights.
She also previously helped launch the Blue Heart Campaign against Human Trafficking.
In her vast public portrayal she appears to be a woman of two personas: bravely outspoken on politics and society in a country where doing so can be extremely dangerous, but also allied with one of the world’s most wanted criminals, a peddler in human misery.
For Penn, she was much more than his golden ticket and he lavished the 43-year-old actress with praise in the now infamous article.
“(She) is among the courageous independent spirits that democracies are built to protect and cannot exist without,” he wrote.
In an interview last year with CNN, she defended her 2012 comments by saying they were an indictment of the Mexican government rather than a celebration of El Chapo.
“Someone like that, at least we know who he is, we know what he does, we know what his profession is. The others sometimes are worse criminals, and have numbed us, and hide everything from us,” she said.
As Penn wrote: “While she was ostracised by many, Kate’s sentiment is widely shared in Mexico” where a government struggles to deal with the power of the narco cartels.
Mexican actress Kate del Castillo. (AP Photo/Matt Sayles, File)Source:AP
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
According to Penn, after reading Ms del Castillo’s statement on Twitter, a lawyer representing El Chapo reached out to her.
Guzmán even sent her flowers to thank her for the apparent words of affection.
El Chapo’s representatives contacted her again after his arrest in February 2014, when “gringos were scrambling to tell his story,” Penn wrote.
In July of that year, El Chapo made his infamous escape from the prison where he was supposedly under heavily armed guard.
For a clever and calculated operator, it was vanity that drought down El Chapo. He wanted to see his story told on the big screen and del Castillo has the kind of connections in Mexico’s movie and film industry to make it happen.
In October last year, del Castillo and Penn eventually met the drug lord after months of negotiations and according to Penn, Guzmán welcomed her “like a daughter returning from college”.
“The trust that El Chapo had extended to us was not to be f**ked with. This will be the first interview El Chapo had ever granted outside an interrogation room, leaving me no precedent by which to measure the hazards,” Penn wrote of the dangerous meeting.
Apparently he needn’t have worried as El Chapo proved a more than adequate host as the Hollywood actor drank tequila with the cartel boss over the course of their seven hour meeting.
A woman reads La Jornada newspaper in Mexico City, January 10. (AFP/Alfredo estrella)Source:AFP
Kate del Castillo in 2007.Source:AP
The Rolling Stone article was published one day after authorities arrested El Chapo in a military raid over the weekend that left five suspects dead in Los Mochis, a coastal city in the northwestern state of Sinaloa.
Authorities now claim the meeting was an integral part of their ability to locate the cartel boss — something which goes a long way towards the Mexican government redeeming itself for allowing his embarrassing escape.
Penn defended his meeting with El Chapo, saying the inevitable controversy is a “question of relative morality”.
As for del Castillo, it remains to be seen how the fallout affects her stellar career. For now she is set to become the first Mexican woman to star in a Netflix drama when she plays Mexico’s First Lady, in the series Ingobernable.
The 20-episode series is scheduled to shoot early this year in Mexico, and will air in late 2016. For the politically minded actress, only time will tell if life imitates art.
As the world now knows, for del Castillo, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Actor Sean Pean has revealed that he and others met with Mexican drug lord Joaqu�n ?El Chapo? Guzm�n, which helped authorities eventually find the fugitive. Photo: Rolling Stone
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