Sean Penn says he is consumed by a “terrible regret” about his interview with Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
{mosads}But his regret is not of glamorizing the world’s most notorious drug trafficker or that he may have aided and abetted a fugitive on the run.
Rather, the actor said he is most disappointed that his article “failed” to create a dialogue about the war on drugs.
“I have a regret that the entire discussion about this article ignores its purpose, which was to try to contribute to this discussion about the policy in the war on drugs,” Penn said in an interview to be aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
“My article failed,” he added.
Penn, whose interview was published in Rolling Stone a day after Guzmán was recaptured, dismissed the notion that he provided material support to Mexican authorities leading to the drug lord’s arrest.
“There is this myth about the visit that we made, my colleagues and I with El Chapo, that it was — as the attorney general of Mexico is quoted — ‘essential’ to his capture,” he said. “We had met with him many weeks earlier … on Oct. 2nd, in a place nowhere near where he was captured.”
The Academy Award-winner also said he thought the Mexican government was “humiliated” that Penn found Guzmán before they did.
“Here’s the things that we know: We know that the Mexican government … they were clearly very humiliated by the notion that someone found him before they did,” he said.
“Well, nobody found him before they did. We didn’t — we’re not smarter than the DEA or the Mexican intelligence,” he added. “We had a contact upon which we were able to facilitate an invitation.”
Penn said he was put in contact with Guzmán through Mexican actress Kate del Castillo, who had been solicited by the kingpin to spearhead a movie project about his life.
Guzmán was recaptured by authorities last week after breaking out of a Mexican maximum-security prison in July.
The Mexican government has said Guzmán will be extradited to the U.S.