El Chapo Speaks

Sean Penn and then-fugitive El Chapo Guzmán, on October 2nd. The photo was taken for verification purposes. After a long dinner and conversation, Chapo granted Penn's request for a formal interview. Courtesy of Sean Penn

Two months ago Rolling Stone published a story Sean Penn wrote about interviewing Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera AKA El Chapo, the head of the Sinaloa drug smuggling cartel in Mexico. I don't know what kind of malware Rolling Stone is using to produce their webpages, but it almost killed my machine. So I did like I did with the Jury Nullification story I posted yesterday and turned it into a Blogger 'page'. You can see it here.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Sean Penn. He is not my favorite actor, but that might be because he strikes a little close to home. It might be that he just has a more extreme version of some of my traits. There are a bunch that we don't share, but the ones that we do are a little unnerving. Whatever. He's a crazy man, I'm a crazy man, we're all a little crazy here.

The bulk of the story is about how he arranged the interview, the interview itself is pretty short. There are some surprising bits to it, like Guzman being as powerful as the President of Mexico, and how none of the things that we might think would have an impact of his business have any impact at all. And there are some parts that don't make any sense at all, but then we have a Mexican telenovela superstar in the mix, and the universe they inhabit has got to be out of this world, so translation might have a hard time crossing the cultural divide. In any case it's an entertaining and enlightening story, regardless of your opinion of Sean.