Kate del Castillo habla primero con The New Yorker, despues con la revista Proceso,

Kate del Castillo habla primero con The New Yorker, despues con la revista Proceso, portada…aunque ambas publicaciones casi apareen simultaneamente.
Tras varias semanas de silencio, la actriz concedió a la revista The New Yorker una entrevista en la que el tema principal es su encuentro con JoaquínGuzmán, y su vida después de que se difundiera su encuentro con el líder del cartel del Pacífico.

La actriz rompió su silencio sobre su polémico encuentro con el narcotraficante y en la entrevista denuncia una "caza de brujas" del gobierno mexicano y desmiente a Sean Penn.

En entrevista para la prestigiosa revista The New Yorker, Kate del Castillo afirmó que los cuestionamientos sobre los supuestos nexos que se le atribuyen con el Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias el ‘Chapo’, “son una cacería de brujas” del gobierno en su contra.

En la conversación que sostuvo con el periodista Robert Draper hace un mes en su casa de Los Ángeles, California, aseguró también que sí existió la posibilidad de hacer una película o un documental sobre el narcotraficante. El ‘Chapo‘ “quería una gran película y que yo la protagonizara”.

La actriz habló de los orígenes de su relación con Guzmán. Cuenta que un día recibió un correo electrónico de parte de gente cercana a ‘El Chapo’ en el verano del 2014, .

La entrevista del medio estadounidense también consigna una carta de puño y letra enviada a la actriz en 2014, donde Guzmán Loera le explica que tiene toda la libertad para hacer la película y elogia su calidad actoral.
The New Yorker tituló a la entrevista, “The Go-between. The Mexican actress who dazzled El Chapo”. (El mensajero. La actriz Mexicana que deslumbró a El Chapo”).
“La noche del 9 de enero de 2012, la actriz mexicana Kate del Castillo se sirvió una copa de vino, se sentó en su ordenador, y abrió Twitter. Acababa de regresar a casa, a Los Ángeles, después de un crucero por el Caribe con su hermana y sus padres.
En esta primera entrevista, la mexicana habló sobre la película de “El Chapo”, sobre el actor Sean Penn, y sobre la investigación de la PGR en su contra.
Kate contó que dos años después de que publicó en Twitter una carta dirigida al capo, recibió un correo electrónico de Andrés Granados Flores, abogado de El Chapo, quien primero se presentó como un productor de cine que quería presentarle un proyecto.

En la entrevista, que saldrá publicada en la versión impresa de la revista el 21 de marzo pero que ya se puede leer en su edición digital, Del Castillo desmiente la versión de Penn.
Por un lado, afirmó que no le reveló su intención de escribir para Rolling Stone en su primer encuentro a finales de septiembre y que solo lo hizo cuando ya estaban con Guzmán el 2 de octubre.
"Es una total y absoluta mentira", afirmó Del Castillo a The New Yorker. "Las cosas no estaban ocurriendo como yo esperaba, pero en ese momento pensé que quizá la película podría basarse en ese artículo", añadió.
Por otro, niega que en su trayecto por carretera hasta donde se reunieron con el narcotraficante, cerca de Cosalá (Sinaloa), fueran parados por un retén militar, tal como escribió Penn en la revista.
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The Go-Between

The Mexican actress who dazzled El Chapo/BY ROBERT DRAPER

CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTIN SCHOELLER FOR THE NEW YORKER

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/21/kate-del-castillo-sean-penn-and-el-chapo?intcid=mod-most-popular

Kate del Castillo at home in Los Angeles. After she tweeted about El Chapo, the drug lord got in touch and asked her to make a movie about his life.

On the evening of January 9, 2012, the Mexican actress Kate del Castillo poured a glass of wine, sat down at her computer, and opened Twitter. She had just returned home, to Los Angeles, after a Caribbean cruise with her sister and her parents. The previous year had been difficult: in November, her marriage to the actor and model Aarón Díaz had ended. Del Castillo had spent much of the year starring as a drug trafficker in “La Reina del Sur” (“The Queen of the South”), a sixty-three-episode telenovela on Telemundo. Her character, Teresa Mendoza, a small-town Mexican woman whose love life enticed her into the narcotics trade, was given to ruthlessly practical observations. “Life’s a business,” Teresa once said. “The only thing that changes is the merchandise.” The series had dominated ratings in the Spanish-speaking world, and made her a household name, particularly in Mexico, but for del Castillo, who is forty-three, the experience had been overwhelming; at one point during filming, she had received medical treatment for exhaustion.

Now she thumbed through a few notebooks filled with song lyrics and observations, and then started typing in an app that allowed her to write longer tweets. “Today I want to express what I think, and if it suits anybody else, great,” she began, in Spanish. 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.”

Last month, I met del Castillo at her house in a gated community in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was sitting on a sunny terrace beside an infinity pool and an array of saguaro cacti. She poured two glasses of a reposado tequila called Honor, a brand she is a part owner of. She wore tight jeans, a blouse, and very high heels, and had a small gold earring in her right lobe that read “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!”

Four years after the fact, del Castillo still seemed bewildered. Her mother, who is also named Kate, told me, “Everything she does is that way—without thinking about the consequences.” The consequence that del Castillo had least anticipated was that the man she had addressed in her tweet might actually respond.

As del Castillo tells the story, in the late summer of 2014 she received an e-mail from one of El Chapo’s associates. Through the Mexican actors’ guild, he had found her parents’ telephone number in Mexico City and told her mother that he was a movie producer who wished to speak to Kate about a project. The first messages he sent del Castillo were vague. Only when she replied that she was too busy for such inquiries did the man state his business: 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. (Del Castillo says that her computer has not saved these e-mails, and that she is relying on her memory of the exchange.) “I immediately said yes,” she told me.

The lawyer, Andrés Granados Flores, had approached del Castillo at a propitious moment. She was in Miami, filming another “narco-series” for Telemundo. Despite the success of “La Reina del Sur,” most people in the U.S. had never heard of her. She had moved to L.A. in 2001, to break into the American movie industry. Patricia Riggen, who cast del Castillo as an undocumented immigrant in her 2007 film, “Under the Same Moon,” told me, “She went from a place where everyone knew her to a place where no one did.” She added, “I think it took a lot of courage.”

For her first U.S. role, in the 2002 PBS series “American Family,” del Castillo says that she was made to dye her brunet hair black, so that she would appear more Latina. She was turned down for other roles, because her accent was too pronounced. In an effort to burnish her acting credentials, she sought out edgy roles, playing a transgender prison inmate in “K-11” and a Bolivian prostitute in “American Visa.” She also appeared in the Showtime series “Weeds,” playing a nefarious Mexican politician who is killed when she gets whacked with a croquet mallet. But such opportunities were rare. She said, “I’d go to auditions, and all the time it’s ‘You’re too Latina,’ or ‘You’re not Latina enough.’ ” Meanwhile, she continued to act in telenovelas like the one she was filming in Miami, in which she again played a wily and glamorous drug trafficker.

On September 29th, del Castillo took a private plane from Miami to an airstrip near Mexico City. Before boarding, she photographed the plane’s tail number and sent it to a friend with instructions to trace the plane if she did not hear from del Castillo that evening. As she emerged from immigration, two men in suits smiled in recognition. One was Granados, who had a youthful appearance, with a wide face and close-cropped hair. Accompanying him was another lawyer, named Óscar Manuel Gómez Núñez, who was short and chubby, with a mustache. El Chapo, they said, had instructed them to take her to dinner at one of the nicest restaurants in Mexico City. Fearing possible encounters with the paparazzi, del Castillo suggested that they go to a nearby taquería instead.

“Señorita, if he knows we’ve taken you to get tacos, he’ll kill us,” she recalls one of them saying. When she blanched, they laughed and assured her that they were joking. They settled on a restaurant by the highway, where they ate at a secluded table. The attorneys told del Castillo that, while El Chapo had received numerous offers from Hollywood producers, he trusted del Castillo and wanted to give her the rights to his life story.

“I was, like, ‘You are kidding me,’ ” del Castillo told me. “ ‘O.K., hold on. First of all, is he interested in a movie, a book, a documentary, a series?’ They said, ‘Anything you want. He’s giving you the rights.’ ” After a minute, del Castillo asked the inevitable question: “Why me?”

According to del Castillo, the lawyers replied, “Because you’re very brave. Because you’re outspoken. Because you always tell the truth, even when it’s about the government. Because you come from a great family. And because he’s a fan of yours from ‘La Reina del Sur.’ ”

Del Castillo and the lawyers talked for two hours. After lunch, one of them told her, “You know what—we first tried to contact you right after you wrote on Twitter. He wanted to send you flowers.” But they were unable to find her address.

In the next several months, del Castillo wrapped shooting for the Telemundo series and then, in early 2015, began rehearsals for “The 33,” a film directed by Patricia Riggen and based on the Chilean miners who were buried underground for two months, in 2010. (Del Castillo played the wife of the main character, portrayed by Antonio Banderas.) All the while, del Castillo imagined visiting El Chapo and conducting a series of interviews to develop the film project. “I was still deciding between a documentary or a movie,” she says, though his preference was clear: “He wanted a big movie, and he wanted me to star in it.” It was not clear to her what strong female roles existed in the life of El Chapo.

She mentioned her new project to almost no one. One exception was an Argentine producer named Fernando Sulichin, whom she had met in early 2012, at a reception hosted by the director and screenwriter Oliver Stone. Sulichin had told del Castillo that he was a fan of her work. Later, the two had lunch at the Polo Lounge, in Beverly Hills, where del Castillo recalls Sulichin telling her, “I read your tweet. Please, please—if you ever have contact with the guy, let me know.”

After she told Sulichin about her meeting in Mexico, he introduced her to another Argentine, José Ibáñez, who had produced the Oliver Stone documentary “South of the Border” with Sulichin. She conveyed their interest to El Chapo’s attorneys. In December, 2014, El Chapo sent del Castillo a handwritten letter:

Thank you so much for what you did for me, because, paisana, you did me the favor of speaking for me. Thanks, amiga, I cannot pay you back for what you did for me. I’m letting you know that I’m O.K. . . . With respect to the rights, you and my lawyers should come to an agreement. With respect to the rights, I want it to be clear that you are the one that decides everything that is done, what you want and what you don’t want.

Then El Chapo referred to “Visitantes,” a Mexican horror film in which del Castillo played a doctor driven mad by apparitions:

On another subject, some friends told me that they went to the movies to see a horror film you were in, amiga. They told me it’s really cool. Hopefully they’ll play it soon on some TV channel. . . . I love your acting, you really go for it. I congratulate you. I imagine acting can’t be so easy, amiga. I hope to say hello to you in person someday. Hopefully soon. Say hello to your dad, and your whole family, for me. I watch your father very often, because they show movies where he’s the main character. O.K., amiga, my respects to you. You’re a love. Thanks so much. Your friend, Joaquín Guzmán.

On January 9, 2015, Guzmán signed over his story rights to Kate del Castillo, for a project to be co-produced by Sulichin and Ibáñez. A notary at the Altiplano prison witnessed his signature. Around the same time, he wrote her a second letter, in which he described his Christmas meal (turkey and Coca-Cola) and also his New Year’s Eve dinner (pork and Coca-Cola). He wrote, “I tell you, that series that you made, I saw it and I loved it. I’ve seen it many times—you’re a great actress in it. I’m referring to ‘La Reina del Sur.’ ”

That one of the world’s most cunning criminals would entrust his life story to an actress he had never met would seem fantastical even in a movie. But, del Castillo told me, “maybe he thought I could understand his world, in a way.” El Chapo’s apparent conflation of truth with fiction—Kate del Castillo as La Reina—suggests a flicker of innocence. “When you meet an actor, you think you know that person really well,” Patricia Riggen said. “So I’m sure El Chapo believed he knew Kate. It’s like John Gotti saying, ‘I’ll only give my role to Al Pacino. He’s the only one who would know how to play me right.’ ”

On July 11, 2015, del Castillo attended a prizefight in L.A. with the boxer and promoter Oscar de la Hoya. Afterward, as she was having a drink at a downtown bar, a friend called and told her that El Chapo had escaped from prison, using a tunnel that ran directly to his cell. The trafficker’s attorney, Granados, later texted her, “I’m celebrating!” She responded, “Me even more.”

Del Castillo insists that she was shocked by the news—her exclusive story had just vanished. When she told Sulichin that their project was now worthless, he assured her that this was not the case. “It just got juicier,” she remembers him telling her.

Sulichin had been discussing El Chapo’s prison break with a friend of his, the actor and director Sean Penn. Penn was known for his interest in Latin-American politics—he had met the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro’s brother Raúl—and his denunciations of the war on drugs. Del Castillo and her two producers believed that their project stood a better chance of being picked up by a film studio if a major figure in American movies, like Penn, was attached to it. When Sulichin told Penn that he knew a Mexican actress who was in close contact with El Chapo, Penn requested a meeting with her.

Penn, Sulichin, and del Castillo met for lunch at Fig, a restaurant in Santa Monica’s Fairmont Hotel. Because del Castillo had an appointment at the U.S. consulate early that afternoon—she was about to take the oath to become an American citizen—she cut their discussion short. Penn did not indicate any interest in del Castillo’s movie project. Instead, referring to El Chapo, he asked, “Do you think we can go and see him?”

Three days later, on September 25th, del Castillo flew to Guadalajara to attend a friend’s birthday. That evening, she met Granados and Gómez. They handed her a BlackBerry and told her that their boss would like to hear from her directly. In these text messages, which were later leaked to the Mexican press—not by del Castillo, almost certainly not by the drug trafficker, and therefore likely by someone inside the Mexican government—El Chapo said that she could come to the Sinaloa resort town of Mazatlán and spend a day with him at a nearby ranch. Then he wrote, “Amiga, if you’ll bring the wine, I’ll also drink yours. . . . I’m not a drinker, but your presence will be a lovely thing and I very much want to get to know you and become very good friends. You are the best in this world. . . . I will take care of you more than I do my own eyes.”

Del Castillo replied, “It moves me so much that you say you’ll take care of me—nobody has ever taken care of me, thank you! And I’ll be free next weekend!”

Del Castillo then left to join her friends, while the lawyers stayed on the BlackBerry to tell El Chapo that she was planning to bring along the two producers as well as Sean Penn, “one of the most famous actors in Hollywood.” El Chapo had never heard of Penn. Gómez then explained that “he made the film ‘21 Grams’ ” and was a “political activist” who had been a critic of the Bush Administration. El Chapo did not object.

The following day, the lawyers gave del Castillo a BlackBerry, so that she could contact El Chapo. They began texting again just after 11 P.M. He told her that he would be glad to welcome her and her friends. She was effusive but also strategic: “Thanks to you I’ll get to meet you—you have no idea how emotional this makes me feel. Thanks for your confidence. I’ve been putting together an important team with people who are highly respected in Hollywood. I want you to hear them out.”

“Amiga,” he replied, “have confidence that everything will be fine—otherwise I wouldn’t be inviting you. I’ll take care of you, you’ll see that when you come, I’ll get to drink your tequila with you. As I told you, I’m not a drinker, but with you I’ll drink to the feeling of being together. Thanks so much for being such a fine person. How beautiful you are, amiga, in every way.’’

Del Castillo flew back to Los Angeles the next day. On October 1st, Penn came over to her house in the late afternoon. He stayed for several hours, even joining a tasting of her tequila that del Castillo was holding. He gave her his passport information so that her assistant could book a charter flight to Guadalajara the following morning. (Del Castillo wired the fee for the plane—$33,720.37—from her bank account. Penn later reimbursed her for a portion of the sum, though their memories differ on the amount.) Penn was eager to hear every detail about how she had come to form a bond with the world’s most famous fugitive. Del Castillo interpreted these inquiries as coming from a potential partner in her film project.

In fact, Penn was asking as a journalist, though he was not taking notes or recording the conversation. By this time, he had contacted Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, and told him that he was about to take a clandestine trip to meet El Chapo. Rolling Stone was struggling. In 2014, the magazine had published a story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia. After an investigation by the Columbia Journalism School determined that the article had not been sufficiently fact-checked, the magazine retracted it. Three lawsuits have been filed against Rolling Stone.

Wenner assigned Penn the story, and on October 2nd del Castillo, Penn, and the two producers, Sulichin and Ibáñez, boarded an eight-seater jet in Van Nuys. Del Castillo had put together a gift package for El Chapo. It included a novel she had written, called “Tuya” (a fictionalized account of her first marriage), a book of poetry by Jaime Sabines Gutiérrez (with her personal favorites underlined), a bottle of her tequila, and two movies on DVD: “Under the Same Moon,” in which she starred, and Penn’s “21 Grams.” Penn was carrying a letter of assignment from Wenner, saying that Penn, Sulichin, and Ibáñez would be the story’s authors. (Del Castillo says that she did not know about the letter.) On the plane, Penn read “ZeroZeroZero,” the Mafia narco-trafficking best-seller, by the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano.

El Chapo’s son, Alfredo Guzmán, met the group at a hotel in Guadalajara, where they left their luggage and their cell phones. At a nearby dirt airfield, they boarded two small planes. During the turbulent two-hour flight, Penn and del Castillo took turns drinking from her gift bottle of tequila to steady themselves. After they landed, in a marshy area, two S.U.V.s drove them seven hours through mountainous forest until they arrived, at about nine in the evening, at a spot near the city of Cosalá, in Sinaloa. Del Castillo saw a few run-down buildings that, it appeared, had been sparsely furnished for this meeting. El Chapo, who wore a clean long-sleeved shirt and jeans, was standing outside and embraced del Castillo immediately.

The group sat outside on metal chairs around a wooden table, while several other men hovered nearby. Del Castillo pulled out the tequila bottle, apologizing for its being half-empty, and introduced her companions to El Chapo, adding, “We still don’t know what we’re going to do—a documentary or a movie.”

“Whatever you want, amiga,” El Chapo assured her, smiling broadly, as he did throughout the evening.

Over tacos and tequila, del Castillo and El Chapo exchanged small talk about her family and his life on the run. Then Penn asked her to translate on his behalf. He said that he was there to write a story for Rolling Stone, and that he would like to do a series of interviews with the drug trafficker. Del Castillo says that she was taken aback. Penn later said in a statement, “Kate was a valued partner in our journey, which was embarked upon with total transparency and full knowledge of our collective interests. From our first meeting, I discussed with her my intention to interview Joaquín Guzmán for an article in connection with the meeting that she facilitated. We discussed it again during the flight and the trip to Mexico with our partners.” Sulichin believes that the article was discussed on the flight to Guadalajara; Ibáñez believes that it was discussed at their hotel in Guadalajara.

Del Castillo says that Penn’s claim that he told her about his idea for an article at their first meeting is “total and complete bullshit,” and that his mention of the story to El Chapo was the first she had heard of it. “This was not how I was expecting the night to be,” she told me. “But at the moment I thought, Maybe we can base the movie on this article.” For several hours, del Castillo served as translator. They discussed Hugo Chávez, the Mexican government, and Donald Trump. El Chapo seemed genuinely curious about whether the American public knew who he was. Penn told him that he would like to hang around for two more days. El Chapo replied that this was impossible. He suggested that they reconvene eight days later. Penn said that he would be happy to do so. He also offered to give their host final approval of the story. Of that decision, Wenner told the Times, “It was a small thing to do in exchange for what we got.”

Throughout, El Chapo was solicitous of del Castillo—pulling out her chair for her, pouring her tequila, asking why she was not eating. “Amiga, I think you have to go to sleep,” he said, eventually. He stood, telling the others that he was going to escort del Castillo to her bedroom.

As he led her down a corridor, he held her elbow. They stopped in a doorway to a room filled with several beds—one of them, presumably hers, behind a screen. She believed, she said, that El Chapo might assault her: “So I say, ‘What the fuck, I might as well say my last words.’ I told him, ‘Amigo, you know why I’m here. And you know what I wrote about you. You’re a very powerful man. And you can do a lot of good. There’s a good man inside of you. So let’s do it.’ ”

“You know what, amiga?” she recalls him replying. “You have a big heart.”

He gestured to the bed behind the screen. “This is where you’ll sleep,” he told her. “You’re not going to see me after this, because I don’t sleep where my guests are. It’s for their security.” He added, “Thanks for giving me one of the best days of my life.”

Penn and El Chapo never met again. A few days later, Mexican troops began conducting raids in the area. One evening in early November, del Castillo and Penn met with Ibáñez at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he was staying. On his iPad, they filmed a video in which Penn proposed to El Chapo that he be interviewed on tape. Later, Penn sent del Castillo an encrypted e-mail with twenty-two questions for her to translate and send to El Chapo. She did so, while telling the trafficker, “After this article, we’ll begin with the movie.”

On December 5th, a package from El Chapo was sent by courier from Mexico to New York, where del Castillo flew to retrieve it. Inside an envelope was a cell phone with a seventeen-minute video of the drug lord nervously and perfunctorily answering only some of Penn’s questions, which were read aloud to him by a man off-camera. Some of the questions Penn had submitted were pointed, if open-ended: whether his products “contribute to the destruction of mankind,” how he justified the use of violence, whether he regarded his business as a “cartel,” whether the Mexican government and the United States Drug Enforcement Administration were corrupt, how he laundered his money, what he thought of the movement to legalize drugs. To most of these El Chapo responded indirectly or not at all. Other, more fanciful lines of inquiry—did he have recurring dreams, how would he describe his relationship with his mother, what kind of future did he wish for his children—elicited game but uncomprehending replies.

Before receiving El Chapo’s responses, Penn had begun writing an initial version of the story. Rolling Stone translated a draft into Spanish, and del Castillo sent it to El Chapo for his approval. He texted back, “Amiga, I approve.” She took this message to Penn’s house in Malibu, where Jason Fine, the managing editor of Rolling Stone, was helping him with revisions.

A few realizations began to dawn on del Castillo, she says now. One was that though she and Sulichin had hoped that Penn might eventually show interest in joining their movie project, it had become clear that he had no such desire. Moreover, El Chapo had given his approval to a version of a story that was still being revised by the writer and his editor. Most of all, del Castillo had been slow to recognize the trouble that awaited her. She had been surprised when Penn told her, early on, that she should retain the services of a criminal-defense attorney. But now she did so.

On December 19th, del Castillo spoke by phone with Alonso Aguilar Zinser, a prominent criminal-defense attorney in Mexico City. Del Castillo described in detail her interactions with El Chapo, including the meeting with Sean Penn and the imminent publication of the story in Rolling Stone. Zinser advised her that he did not think she was guilty of any crimes. He said that he would be back in touch with her after he returned from a two-week vacation. But on Thursday, January 7th, Zinser told her that he would not be taking the case, citing a conflict of interest with existing clients. (In response to my questions, Zinser did not elaborate, beyond saying that he was not representing anyone in the federal government or any of Guzmán’s associates.)

That evening—the unofficial beginning of Golden Globes weekend—Penn invited del Castillo to join him and two friends for an after-dinner drink at the Sunset Tower Hotel, in West Hollywood. When she sat down, Penn handed her his phone. On its screen was the final layout of his story, “El Chapo Speaks.” In this version were details that had not appeared in the earliest drafts that she had discussed with a lawyer for Wenner Media. Penn had apparently misheard her description of how El Chapo’s lawyers had been unable to find her mailing address. Penn’s rendition in the story—“She nervously offered her address, but with the gypsy movements of an actress, the flowers did not find her”—made it seem, in her mind, that she had been encouraging Guzmán’s courtship even before a movie project had been on the table. (Penn maintains that his version is correct.) Del Castillo scrolled through Penn’s article, and, according to his friends, she gave no indication that she was upset. She says that she left the bar without reading the story in its entirety.

Later, she noticed a scene that had not appeared in the version that had been sent to El Chapo. In a draft that had been sent to del Castillo around Christmas, there was a note from Fine, remarking on the long drive to see El Chapo: “DESCRIPTION FEELS A LITTLE TOO GENERALIZED. LET’S ADD MORE DETAILS OF THE RIDE, THE EXPERIENCE, THE TERRAIN, WHAT PEOPLE SAY—BLOW BY BLOW OVER THAT SEVEN HOURS.” The final version included this addition: “And then, as it seems we are at the entrance of Oz, the highest peak visibly within reach, we arrive at a military checkpoint. Two uniformed government soldiers, weapons at the ready, approach our vehicle. Alfredo lowers his passenger window; the soldiers back away, looking embarrassed, and wave us through. Wow. So it is, the power of a Guzmán face. And the corruption of an institution.” This scene, del Castillo maintains, did not occur: they didn’t go through any military checkpoint, much less one where government soldiers waved them on. Sulichin and Ibáñez, who were in the car ahead of del Castillo and Penn, also have no recollection of encountering a military checkpoint. (Penn maintains that his version is correct.) The lawyer for Wenner Media apparently did not bring up this incident to del Castillo, but a representative for Rolling Stone pointed out that she saw the final version on Penn’s phone and did not mention the discrepancy before publication.

The following day, January 8th, at 12:19 P.M., Enrique Peña Nieto, the President of Mexico, exulted on Twitter. “Mission accomplished: we have him,” he wrote. “I wish to inform the Mexican people that Joaquín Guzmán Loera has been captured.” A few hours later, Arely Gómez González, the country’s attorney general, told reporters that the government had been tracking El Chapo’s whereabouts for months, thanks in part to his interactions with people who had no obvious connection to his drug empire. Gómez said, “He established communication with actresses and producers, which is part of a new line of investigation.”

The next morning, Gerardo Reyes, a reporter with Univision, called her. Reyes had learned from a source in the Mexican government that one of the actors the attorney general had referred to was del Castillo.

She hung up on Reyes. After a second reporter contacted her, she recalls thinking, I’m calling Sean, I’m calling everybody. She told Jason Fine that her name had been leaked to the press. That evening, two days earlier than planned, Rolling Stone posted Penn’s story on its Web site. The article, which was ten thousand words long, was widely circulated, but criticism quickly followed. In the San Francisco Chronicle, John Diaz wrote, “For those of us who care about the profession, and the daily threat to our brethren who practice it in one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, Penn’s scoop was nothing to envy.” On Twitter, people used the hashtag #NoSeanPenndejos—which can be roughly translated as “Don’t be stupid assholes”—to heap scorn on the actor. This January, during a lengthy interview on “60 Minutes,” Penn said, “My article has failed.” He added, “The entire discussion about this article ignores its purpose, which was to try to contribute to this discussion about the policy in the war on drugs.”

Penn conceded that the story was what he termed “experiential journalism,” a characterization that the press picked up on. “You’re talking to the biggest criminal in the world, and you ask him if he loves his mother,” Sabina Berman, a Mexican essayist and playwright who has written extensively about El Chapo, said to me. “And you don’t ask him, O.K., is the Army working with you? Who distributes the drugs in America? Who are your partners, or are you distributing them yourself? How about the police in America, the D.E.A.—is it true that they have a pact with you? What about the heroin trade that is growing in America—is it you or is it someone else?” She added, “This was no interview. This was a publicity stunt.”

Later, Fine texted del Castillo and asked if he could meet her in Los Angeles and interview her for another Rolling Stone story. “I didn’t even answer him, I was so mad,” she says.

Del Castillo “has always been impulsive and straightforward,” the Mexican TV host and clothing designer Montserrat Oliver, one of del Castillo’s closest friends, told me. During the 2000 Presidential election, she had vocally supported the opposition candidate, Vicente Fox, incurring the displeasure of her employer, Grupo Televisa. A few months after del Castillo’s initial tweet, she played a starring role in “Colosio,” a historical drama about the Mexican Presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was assassinated in 1994. The movie’s release coincided with the 2012 elections, and it was widely thought to have been timed to embarrass the country’s powerful Partido Revolucianario Institucional. “This time, I think it went further than what she thought might happen,” Oliver continued. “The government must be very mad at her. If I were the President and these actors come and make a fool out of me, I’d be pissed, too.” The Mexican historian and essayist Enrique Krauze told me, “There’s an immense risk in approaching a person that has done such harm with a sympathetic view. Even as a biographer, I can tell you that. I don’t care if his father didn’t like him—I’m not moved by that, any more than I’m moved by Hitler’s pathetic past. The main point is that she was talking to a mass murderer. And, in the process of doing that, reality became fiction. While travelling to see him and exchanging messages, she was living out her most outrageous and extraordinary film work.”

After the capture of El Chapo and the publication of Penn’s story, it soon became evident that the Mexican government was singling out del Castillo as a target of investigation. Though El Chapo may well have exchanged texts with a number of people while in hiding, only the conversations with del Castillo were leaked to the Mexican media. In an interview with El Universal on January 19th, Attorney General Gómez said that her office was investigating del Castillo for money laundering. Gómez referred to the actress’s tequila business and to the movie project as potential areas of financial collusion with the drug trafficker. Asked if other people were being investigated in connection to the movie project, Gómez replied, “For the moment, no. The only person involved for the moment is her, and the investigation will inform us if there are other persons.” As for Penn, Gómez said only, “The federal attorney general’s office affirms that he is not being investigated for anything.”

This public statement appeared to be a violation of Mexican law, which forbids disclosure of any information pertinent to an ongoing investigation, including the name of the person being investigated. Indeed, a spokesperson for Gómez declined my request for an interview with her to discuss the case, writing, “Under the guarantees of the law and of due process, we are barred from fulfilling your request.”

In Mexico, the saga of El Chapo y Kate has provided a distraction from far graver domestic issues: the unsolved disappearance, in 2014, of forty-three students in Guerrero; the deaths, that year, of an estimated eight thousand people in activity related to organized crime; the decrease in value of the peso against the dollar to all-time lows.

The charges that del Castillo could face—all of which she vigorously denies—are nonetheless serious. Money laundering, for example, carries a penalty of between five and twenty-five years, and the wording of the law is unusually broad. According to one of del Castillo’s Mexican lawyers (who, fearing reprisals from the government, requested anonymity), “It’s so broad that anyone can be found guilty under that definition. As an actual example, she used the planes of El Chapo to go to their meeting.”

On the advice of her attorneys, del Castillo has remained in Los Angeles. Federal law in Mexico permits the authorities to place her under house arrest, without bringing charges against her, for up to eighty days. She had been expecting to be in Mexico now, filming scenes for a new Netflix series, “Ingobernable.” It features del Castillo as Emilia Urquiza, the First Lady of Mexico, whose husband is mysteriously killed, prompting her dangerous quest for justice. A representative for Netflix told me that del Castillo will remain in the series. Epigmenio Ibarra, the creator of “Ingobernable,” said, “We thought about the series with Kate in mind for over a year now.” He added, “Through her past roles, she has redefined what a female character can be in Hispanic television.”

Following the publication of Penn’s article in Rolling Stone, del Castillo spent two weeks sequestered in her house, in order to avoid reporters and photographers. To cheer her up, friends from Mexico sent her images of piñatas bearing her likeness and YouTube clips of balladeers crooning reverent corridos about her exploits with El Chapo. When she finally ventured out with a friend one Saturday night, to the Mexican restaurant El Coyote, on Beverly Boulevard, she was confronted in the parking lot by a cameraman from TMZ.

During three days of conversation I had with del Castillo, she was always wearing casual but elegant clothes. She was at times contrite, lamenting at one point, “See, I just do things, and I never see the consequences.” She repeatedly emphasized that she condemned El Chapo’s criminality. But she also echoed the affinity for him that she displayed in her initial tweet. She seemed sympathetic to El Chapo’s frequent claim that he fell into the drug trade because his impoverished community in Sinaloa offered no economic alternative. Del Castillo told me, “I can relate to that. Because I should be in Mexico. I love Mexico and I’ve been an actress since I was nine. It’s been a heartbreak to me to leave my country to have to find something else because my country didn’t provide me with those opportunities.”

Del Castillo regards the Mexican government’s investigation of her as “a witch hunt.” She sees elements of sexism in the media’s depiction of her: “They always mention my age. They don’t talk about Sean’s age, or him being in love with or admiring El Chapo.” Though she clearly wants to avoid making enemies in Hollywood, she worries that Penn, Sulichin, and Ibáñez might have somehow left her exposed when they did not insist on including her as a journalist on assignment in the letter that Jann Wenner gave to Penn. Her movie project with a notorious criminal has not turned out as planned, but del Castillo maintains that the endeavor is a worthy one, and that she intends to see it through to completion.

She can apparently still count on the support of El Chapo. Last month, one of the trafficker’s lawyers told the Associated Press, “I know that Kate is Mr. Joaquín Guzmán’s representative. . . . And he told me Monday that the movie has to go forward.” ♦