Kate Castillo speaks out with her version of the Meeting with El Chapo

Lucio R Borderland Beat written with  material from New Yorker Magazine

M

exican born actress Kate del Castillo is speaking out in interviews, giving her story of the infamous Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman meeting.

Diane Sawyer scored the first sit-down TV interview with Castillo airing on March 18, at 10:00 p.m. on ABC’s 20/20 program. The actress will discuss the events of the Chapo interview and what led to the capture of the drug lord.

Castillo has given an interview the New Yorker Magazine, which is scheduled to be released in print on March 21, but can already be accessed online.

The New Yorker article is titled “The Go Between”, and it is her version of events that led to her brokering a meeting between actor Sean Penn, two Argentine filmmakers that work with Oliver Stone, and the world’s most famous drug trafficker, El Chapo.

Yet another version of the meeting that was a pivotal moment in time for the main characters involved. 

Kate says that on January 9^th, she had just returned home, to Los Angeles, after a family trip.  It was a trying time for the actress, her marriage to model Aaron Diaz had fizzled.  

She poured a glass of wine, sat down at her computer, and logged on to Twitter.

From New Yorker: 

Using the Tweet longer app, during the next half hour, she proceeded to free-associate on love and politics: “I don’t believe in marriage, I believe in love . . . I don’t believe in either punishment or sin . . . I don’t believe in the Pope and the Vatican and all their wealth . . . I am alive and for that I thank God every day, for who I am, for good or bad.” 

Then she turned to Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, or Shorty—the leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel. El Chapo had escaped from prison in 2001, and had been at large since then. He was widely understood to be the most powerful drug lord in Mexico, if not the world, and was considered responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. Yet many Mexicans saw him as a populist antihero rather than as a murderer, because of his humble origins, his defiance of a corrupt and ineffective federal government, and his reputation for benevolence to Sinaloa’s poor and downtrodden. Del Castillo wrote, “Today I believe more in El Chapo Guzmán than I do in the governments that hide truths from me, even if they are painful, who hide the cures for cancer, AIDS, etc., for their own benefit. MR. CHAPO, WOULDN’T IT BE COOL IF YOU STARTED TRAFFICKING WITH THE GOOD? . . . COME ON SEñOR, YOU WOULD BE THE HERO OF HEROES. LET’S TRAFFIC WITH LOVE, YOU KNOW HOW.” She signed off, “I love you all, Kate,” pressed Send, brushed her teeth, and went to bed. 

Shortly afterward, Del Castillo went to Tijuana, where a friend was undergoing breast-implant surgery. In the hospital, the popular talk show “Tercer Grado” was playing on TV, and del Castillo and her friend watched as the guests took turns denouncing her tweet. Carlos Marín, the editorial director of the publishing company Grupo Milenio, was particularly savage. “This actress wrote a truly stupid thing on Twitter,” he said, “and she displays an abysmal ignorance about the problem of cancer, the problem of AIDS.” He added that this “beautiful, lovely, great actress” was “encouraging the commission of crime.” 

For weeks, the Mexican public obsessed over del Castillo’s tweet, debating whether she was an apologist for the cruelty and bloodshed committed in El Chapo’s name. Her father, Eric del Castillo, who is also a well-known actor, defended her to the media but then e-mailed her a line-by-line critique of her manifesto. Her older sister, the journalist Verónica del Castillo, says that she angrily reminded Kate, “You are not Teresa Mendoza.” (A reference to the character she plays starring as a drug trafficker in “La Reina del Sur” (“The Queen of the South”)

Castillo and Diaz

She lamented her tweet by telling the New Yorker, “Fuck.” “I was so upset,” she said, of the reaction to her tweet. “You know, why are they crushing me? I’m not saying all of this is true. This is just what I believe!”

Castillo tells the story, in the late summer of 2014 she received an e-mail from one of El Chapo’s associates. About a project, but he was vague,  she blew him off.. until he said Soy licensiado de Señor Joaquín Guzmán Loera. (“I am Señor Joaquín Guzmán Loera’s lawyer.”) He told her that the drug lord, who had been re-arrested that February, was interested in making a movie about his life. He asked if she would come to Mexico City to discuss the prospect. She agreed and met with them on September 29^th.

She says she was offered a book, film, series…whatever she wanted.  When she asked “Why me?” supposedly it was because she is outspoken, came from a great family, and because he was a fan of ‘La Reina del Sur.’ ”

On January 9, 2015, Guzmán signed over his story rights to Kate del Castillo, for a project to be co-produced by the Argentine film makers, Sulichin and Ibáñez.

In the article she goes into detail how Penn became involved, how she fears she was betrayed by them by not being included in the “journalist assignment” letter.  She states that Penn did not reveal anything about an interview for Rolling Stone magazine until they were in Mexico.

She claims that her computer did not keep the emails sent by Chapo’s attorney, and other assertions such as letters from El Chapo, which she gives the contents, but did not share an image of such letters.  The fact that Chapo is illiterate, and while in prison had a “letter writer”, so it is possible. 

Recently, Castillo shared her plans to go ahead with the film of Chapo.  No word if Penn will be playing the lead role as he planned. 

 Read the full New Yorker article by linking here