Sean Penn would have loved Stalin. If there is a murderer, despot, or tyrant in the world Sean Penn finds a way to express his love. He defended the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to the point he called for the arrest of anyone who called the dictator a dictator. He interviewed and did a puff piece about despotic Castro brothers saying that the media tries “demonize perceived enemies” like the two brothers.
In his latest Penn interviewed Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán for Rolling Stone. While El Chapo was caught last week, Penn’s interview was done while the murderer and drug dealer was on the run. In typical Penn American-hating style he tries to make the killer look like a “nice guy,” and tries to blame the U.S. for everything the Mexican did wrong.
In the introduction to the interview, Penn describes Guzmán as a type of Robin Hood:
Chapo swiftly rose through the ranks, building an almost mythic reputation: First, as a cold pragmatist known to deliver a single shot to the head for any mistakes made in a shipment, and later, as he began to establish the Sinaloa cartel, as a Robin Hood-like figure who provided much-needed services in the Sinaloa mountains, funding everything from food and roads to medical relief. By the time of his second escape from federal prison, he had become a figure entrenched in Mexican folklore.
Penn was disturbed at having to keep the secret location of the murderer, but in the end decided El Chapo wasn’t that bad because his murders weren’t personal, strictly business:
I took some comfort in a unique aspect of El Chapo’s reputation among the heads of drug cartels in Mexico: that, unlike many of his counterparts who engage in gratuitous kidnapping and murder, El Chapo is a businessman first, and only resorts to violence when he deems it advantageous to himself or his business interests.
I am sure we would all forgive a corporate CEO who killed his competitor in the name of his business. Penn omits all those other deaths Guzmán is culpable for those thousands killed because they were consuming El Chapo’s poison.
According to Penn, it’s all the fault of that evil America:
(…) 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.
It’s not his fault he is only fulfilling a demand. It is that demand coming from America, not El Chapo causing all those deaths in Mexico. As for the drug kingpin, Penn says he is an affable person:
Throughout my introduction, Chapo smiles a warm smile. In fact, in what would be a seven-hour sit-down, I saw him without that smile only in brief flashes. As has been said of many notorious men, he has an indisputable charisma. When I ask about his dynamic with the Mexican government, he pauses. “Talking about politicians, I keep my opinion to myself. They go do their thing and I do mine.”
Guzmán, who in the past has denied participation in the drug trade and portrayed himself as a peasant farmer, spoke unapologetically about his lucrative business
“I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world, I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats.”
As he did with the Castro brothers and Hugo Chávez, Sean Penn attempts to portray Guzmán as a good person who started his “business” because he grew up poor and continues it almost for the good of mankind. The truth is when there was a “truce” between cartels, Guzmán was the first to break the the truce and the subsequent cartel war has claimed more than 50,000 lives in the past nine years. That’s only part of the story:
In 2013, the most recent year for which data is available, 46,471 people in the United States died from drug overdoses, and more than half of those deaths were caused by prescription painkillers and heroin.
That compares with the 35,369 who died in motor vehicle crashes and 33,636 who died from firearms, as tallied by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
What’s not counted in the 46K number are the car accidents and other deaths caused by people who are on drugs.
The bottom line is despite the picture Sean Penn tries to paint, “El Chapo” is not a Robin Hood, or a nice guy who kills only when he has to, Joaquín Guzmán is a ruthless murderer who not only kills his competitors, but via the product he “sells” he kills tens of thousands of Americans each year.
But as he has done before, Penn doesn’t care about truth, he only cares about trashing America. Rolling Stone titled the interview “El Chapo Speaks,” but a much better title would have been “El Chapo Speaks to El Schmuck-o.”
According to Reuters there was one good thing about Sean Penn’s interview, it led to El Chapo’s capture:
And two senior Mexican government sources said they were indeed aware of the October meeting and monitored his movements.
That helped lead them days later to a ranch where Guzman was staying, one of the sources said. Mexican forces used helicopter gunships to attack Guzman’s ranch during a siege that lasted days.
The kingpin narrowly escaped, with what he told Del Castillo was a minor leg injury, but the raid in the northern state of Durango was a major breakthrough in the manhunt.
Guzman was finally recaptured on Friday in the northern city of Los Mochis after a bloody action movie-like shootout. Mexican marines pursued the wily kingpin through storm drains before intercepting his getaway in a hijacked car.
Joe Newby reports that Penn is being investigated by the Mexican authorities about the interview read Joe’s report on Conservative Firing Line by clicking here.
