“My Article Has Failed”: Sean Penn Regrets His El Chapo Interview

Sean Penn has spoken out at length for the first time on his controversial interview with Mexican drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, saying that he has “terrible regret” about how it played out in the media, and that he considers his article a “failure.”
Last weekend, Rolling Stone published a feature in which Penn interviewed Guzman about his life in the drug trade, and which included details of a meeting between the pair, conducted last year at a secret location in Mexico.
The Mexican and American governments were both fairly unimpressed that a Hollywood actor set up a meeting with their most wanted criminal and failed to tell them, and Penn himself seems fairly down-in-the-dumps at this point.
In an interview with Charlie Rose of CBS – which is set to air in full on the U.S. version of 60 Minutes this Sunday night – he was frank in his assessment of the Rolling Stone piece and its subsequent fallout.
Penn told Rose that he intended to start a “conversation” about the war on drugs with his piece, but that it didn’t pan out that way.  “My article failed,” he said. “Let’s be clear. My article has failed.”
The actor says he was trying to put forward the view that federal pursuit and prosecution of high-profile drug lords like Guzman doesn’t have an effect on overall drug use. He said:

“We’re going to put all our focus – forget about blame – we’re going to put all our focus, all our energy, all our billions of dollars on the ‘bad guy,’ and what happens? You get another death the next day the same way … I have a terrible regret. 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 on the war on drugs.”
Penn also took a spray at the Mexican government, disputing its claims that his interview was somehow essential to Guzman’s capture, and saying that Mexico is just “humiliated” that he got to the drug lord 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. Well, nobody found him before they did. We didn’t – we’re not smarter than the DEA or the Mexican intelligence. We had a contact upon which we were able to facilitate an invitation.”
The actor believes that the Mexican government want to see him blamed for the capture, putting him in the crosshairs of El Chapo’s cartel, but told Rose that in spite of this, he does not fear for his life.
As for the backlash against him in certain parts of the media, Penn maintained that those bitches just be jealous, saying:

“When you get the story that every journalist in the world wanted, there’s a lot of green-eyed monsters who gonna come give you a kiss …[There are] ‘journalists’ who want to say that I’m not a journalist – well, I want to see the license that says that they’re a journalist.”
El Chapo may or may not have any idea who the fuck Sean Penn is by the time the full interview airs in the U.S. 
Story: CBS News
Photo: Michael Tran / Getty / Rolling Stone

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