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Does everyone remember when Sean Penn said he had “a terrible regret” because his exclusive Rolling Stone interview with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán didn’t properly delve into War on Drugs?
El Chapo and Mexican actress Kate del Castillo, who arranged the meeting, also have some terrible regrets.
Mexican drug lord Guzman was arrested and del Castillo can’t go back home.
It all started with a tweet.
Kate del Castillo, who was living in Los Angeles at the time, wistfully tweeted one day: “Today I believe more in El Chapo Guzman than I do in the governments that hide truths from me, even if they are painful.”
Not a smart thing to say, even in a tweet, but she went on: “Mr. Chapo, wouldn’t it be cool if you started trafficking with the good? Let’s traffic with love, you know how.”
As we know, tweets will be tweets.
Kate’s tweets exploded like fireworks as Mexican authorities accused her of romanticizing El Chapo, who at the time was on the run after his first prison escape in 2001.
Later, in 2014, after El Chapo was recaptured, his lawyers contacted del Castillo and offered her the rights to his life story for a film or TV project, as well as his private cell number, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Then the texting started.
Not even a year passed and Guzman escaped prison again in July 2015. He invited del Castillo to visit him in his clandestine hideout in the mountains of Sinaloa.
That’s when El Chapo and del Castillo made a terrible mistake: they invited Sean Penn.
The meeting helped Mexican authorities trace the drug lord’s location.
How could it not…Sean Penn and Mexico’s most famous actress?
El Chapo was soon rearrested and extradited to the United States, and Kate del Castillo is being sought by Mexican authorities.
While del Castillo was not able to make the film about Guzman’s life, she did not lose her appeal as a movie star.
She was soon tapped by Mexican producer Epigmenio Ibarra to star in a Netflix series, “Ingobernable” (“Ungovernable”), set in Mexico.
But when they started filming of the Spanish-language drama last summer, del Castillo said she couldn’t go to Mexico without risking arrest.
After her meeting with Guzman, she became the target of a “witch hunt” by the Mexican government.
Last year, then-Mexican Attorney General, Arely Gomez, announced that her office was investigating del Castillo on possible money laundering charges, suggesting the actress may have received money from Guzman for the film project and to help finance her tequila business.
“I never received money from El Chapo. I was never going to do business with him. And that is all, all (the authorities) accuse me of,” she told Jorge Ramos of Univision, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Del Castillo’s attorney requested a court-ordered injunction prohibiting authorities from detaining her after the Mexican government issued an order to find and question her.
As a result of the order, she said, several planned acting projects were shelved and her cast insurance went up.
“People were afraid because they didn’t know if I would be able to perform, or if suddenly the FBI or the DEA was going to come and yank me out of production,” she said.
But Ungovernable producer Ibarra is not the least concerned about his star’s political problems. Indeed he seems to relish them.
He said he never considered anyone else for the role, despite del Castillo’s travel restrictions.
In the Netflix series, del Castillo plays the Mexican first lady who goes on the run when she is falsely accused of killing her husband.
Del Castillo’s role is filmed in San Diego, and they use a double for her street scenes in Mexico.
“Any producer or journalist would have pursued this story,” Ibarra said of del Castillo’s meeting with Guzman. “We chose a great woman, a great actress and a great fighter. We are with her.”
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