Penn might not have willingly participated in the search for El Chapo but, as Mexico’s Attorney General Arely Gomez explained on a local radio station this week, their meet-up “was an essential element, because we were following [Guzman’s] lawyer, and the lawyer took us to these people and to this meeting.”
According to Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, that could be enough to put Penn and Mexican actress Kate del Castillo, who facilitated the meeting, in jeopardy.
“These cartels are very violent, they do not forgive any transgression and they will respond in a most violent manner,” Vigil told Yahoo News. “These are people who have dismembered, who have decapitated individuals. So killing Sean Penn and del Castillo means absolutely nothing to them.”
Vigil, whose decades-long DEA career includes several years of undercover work with Mexican cartels, said he thought it was a careless move on the Mexican government’s part to publicize any ties between the Penn meeting and Guzman’s arrest.
“If Chapo Guzman perceives that they cooperated with authorities in his capture, [the cartel] will go after them,” Vigil said, arguing that the risk is likely higher for del Castillo because she was the one in contact with Guzman. She was the one whom Guzman’s associates were instructed to provide with a Blackberry—the phone they’d deemed most secure—and it was their flirtatious correspondence that led to that fateful meeting in the jungle with Sean Penn.
“He developed a childlike infatuation with del Castillo and forgot about the fact that when he was captured in 2014, he was captured as a result of telephone monitoring,” Vigil said. “Apart from that, [del Castillo] is originally from Mexico, she has all of her family in Mexico. One of the traditional violent methods [the cartels] use is if they can’t get to the target, they’ll go after their family members.”
He added, “If I were Kate del Castillo I would run like the wind.”
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While Penn said he believes the Mexican authorities have deliberately tried to put the blame on him for Guzman’s arrest, he told Charlie Rose he does not fear for his life.
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“People in Hollywood have a tendency to live in a cocoon and they really don’t understand all of these implications,” he said.
