MEXICO CITY (AP) – Recently captured drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was unapologetic for running one of the world’s biggest drug trafficking organizations in a Rolling Stone interview with American actor Sean Penn published late Saturday.
Guzman said he entered the drug trade at age 15 because there was no other way to survive. “The only way to have money to buy food, to survive, is to grow poppy, marijuana, and at that age, I began to grow it, to cultivate it and to sell it. That is what I can tell you.”
Penn had the first-ever interview with Guzman in October while the world’s most wanted drug lord was on the lam, having escaped in an elaborate tunnel from Mexico’s maximum security prison in July. Guzman was recaptured Friday in the city of Los Mochis in his home state of Sinaloa in a shootout that killed five of his associates and wounded one marine.
A Mexican law enforcement official said Saturday that the October interview in the remote community of Tamazula in the northern state of Durango helped authorities track the whereabouts of the drug lord, who earns millions shipping tons of cocaine and manufacturing and transporting methamphetamine and heroin to world markets, the largest in the U.S. market.
Three days after the interview, members of the Mexican Navy launched an operation to capture him, but Attorney General Arely Gomez said Friday that it was aborted because he was accompanied by two women and a young girl, whom they did not want to harm.