
Perhaps his adoration is because “Shorty” is no taller than Sean – that’s a fellow who’s hard to find.
Sean Penn meets secretly with El Chapo, writes glowingly about it for Rolling Stone
“While I was surfing the waves of Malibu at age 9, he was already working in the marijuana and poppy fields of the remote mountains of Sinaloa,” Penn says of Guzman, who, like the actor, is in his early 50s.
“Today he runs the biggest international drug cartel the world has ever known, exceeding even that of Pablo Escobar,” Penn says.
“He shops and ships by some estimates more than half of all the cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana that come into the United States.”
Penn concedes in the piece that he “may be perceived as protecting criminals.”
Guzman may be a billionaire murderer and peddler of poison, but what of our own guilt, as customers of his wares, Penn muses.
As an American citizen, I’m drawn to explore what may be inconsistent with the portrayals our government and media brand upon their declared enemies. Not since Osama bin Laden has the pursuit of a fugitive so occupied the public imagination. But unlike bin Laden, who had posed the ludicrous premise that a country’s entire population is defined by – and therefore complicit in – its leadership’s policies, with the world’s most wanted drug lord, are we, the American public, not indeed complicit in what we demonize?
We are the consumers, and as such, we are complicit in every murder, and in every corruption of an institution’s ability to protect the quality of life for citizens of Mexico and the United States that comes as a result of our insatiable appetite for illicit narcotics.
Penn adds, “As much as anything, it’s a question of relative morality.”
I assume we’ll see Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Carter play starring roles in the upcoming hagiography.