Jan. 12--If you read to the bottom of Sean Penn's opus about his tacos-and-tequila sit-down with a murderous fugitive narcotrafficker, you might be surprised to learn that the article is dedicated "to the parents of slain Chicago youth."
It's a curious touch, because those slain children aren't mentioned in the 10,000-word piece published Saturday by Rolling Stone. Nor is there any other mention of Chicago, where Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was named Public Enemy No. 1 by the Chicago Crime Commission.
So we don't know which children Penn is talking about, or who killed them. We do know that federal prosecutors say El Chapo is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people: Rivals whose executions he ordered. Gangbangers who killed each other in drug turf battles. Innocents, including children, who were caught in the crossfire.
We know that Chicago is the hub of his U.S. distribution network.
"I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world," El Chapo bragged to Penn at a clandestine meeting in a Mexican jungle in October. "I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats."
So yeah, Sean Penn met with the legendary El Chapo, who'd escaped months earlier from Mexico's most secure prison on an underground motorcycle. That's a scoop.
But "El Chapo speaks" might as well have been headlined "Sean Penn preens." It's an insufferably long look-at-me narrative -- Penn meeting with an intermediary "in the courtyard of a boutique hotel in Paris in late August," Penn urinating at the side of the road during the long ride to the rendezvous site, Penn passing gas in the presence of El Chapo as the men part for the evening -- with a cursory Q at the end.
The questions were submitted via Blackberry Messenger, weeks after the face-to-face encounter. There was no opportunity to follow up or challenge the answers, which explains how Rolling Stone came to publish the meaningless exchanges reproduced here in their entirety:
Do you consider yourself a violent person? No, sir.
With respect to your activities, what do you think the impact on Mexico is? Do you think there is a substantial impact? Not at all. Not at all.
Penn and Rolling Stone agreed in advance to submit the story to Guzman for his approval -- a big journalistic no-no -- before publishing it. (Guzman didn't request any changes, which ought to tell you something.) "It was a small thing to do in exchange for what we got," Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner said.
What did Rolling Stone get, beyond the obvious click bait?
To be clear: It didn't get an interview with El Chapo. Penn and his associates spent several hours in the company of the kingpin, his sons and his lieutenants. Cellphones and other electronics had been confiscated, and Penn did not take notes. His goal was to win Guzman's confidence and spend the next two days recording their conversations.
When he tried to close the deal at the end of the evening, though, he was told to go home and return in eight days. To document the meeting, Guzman's son snapped a photo of the drug lord sharing an awkward handshake with an actor playing a journalist.
The second meeting never took place because Mexican and U.S. authorities suddenly closed in, reportedly tipped to El Chapo's whereabouts by the movements of Penn's group. El Chapo was arrested Friday.
So the part of the Rolling Stone piece that's about El Chapo and not about Penn is basically a collection of impressions that are precisely what you might expect from someone famous for palling around with the likes of Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro.
Never mind that El Chapo once bragged of ordering the deaths of more than 2,000 people. "This simple man from a simple place, surrounded by the simple affections of his sons to their father, and his toward them, does not initially strike me as the big bad wolf of lore," Penn wrote.
The drug lord is presented as a charismatic man who escaped a childhood of poverty and became a "Robin Hood-like figure," paying for food, roads and medical care for peasants in the Sinaloa mountains. Penn is comforted by Guzman's reputation as a "businessman first" who "only resorts to violence when he deems it advantageous to himself or his business interests." Seriously.
"Whatever villainy is attributed to this man, and his indisputable street genius, he is also a humble, rural Mexican, whose perception of his place in the world offers a window into an extraordinary riddle of cultural disparity."
Who's to blame for all that villainy, then? The American public, that's who. "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." We're not buying it.
It's possible to agree with Penn that the war on drugs is a failure without giving a pass to the billionaire thug who directs the bloody enterprise, but never mind. The actor had more important questions for El Chapo.
Do you have any dreams? If you could change the world, would you? How is your relationship with your mom?
He never asked about the slain children in Chicago.
