The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

A movie, a drug lord and an actress: this is how Kate del Castillo was investigated before and after the fall of Chapo

2022-01-16T03:47:50.215Z


The investigation of the Peña Nieto prosecutor's office on the actress casts doubt on the motivations and clues that prompted her surveillance for 17 months, according to the investigation to which EL PAÍS had access


According to the judicial account, it all started with an anonymous email received on September 24, 2015, almost three months after the incredible escape of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán from the El Altiplano maximum security prison: the message warned the authorities that the Actress Kate del Castillo planned to meet with the leader of the Sinaloa cartel because she wanted to produce a movie about her life. "On September 25, 2015, she will meet with him in the town of La Tuna, in Badiraguato, Sinaloa," the transcript reads, "you will only need to follow her or tap their phones to verify what I am telling you." More than a breath, that message seemed like an instruction (“they will tour the town that day and visit the mother”, it says elsewhere, “if there are no armed forces nearby”). Anyway, ever since that day,The actress officially became a target of the then Attorney General's Office (PGR), and remained so long after the drug trafficker was recaptured a few months later, in January 2016.

The review of the investigation that the authorities launched at the end of 2015 against Kate del Castillo, to which EL PAÍS had access, leaves open a question about the reasons or the clues that prompted that investigation after the fall of Chapo: for 17 months, the PGR used wiretaps, intelligence police, tax audits, testimonial interviews and cooperation with the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to see if it was possible to prosecute Del Castillo for crimes such as organized crime, operations with resources of illicit origin and cover-up, taking as a starting point their exchanges and their meeting with El Chapo Guzmán. Nothing worked:the tests did not serve to associate her with the Sinaloa cartel nor did they reveal that there was money from the capo behind the tequila that the actress promoted, but the process gave rise to a long novel with leaked chats, crossed accusations, lawsuits and a surreal encounter between one of the biggest drug traffickers in the world, actor Sean Penn, Kate del Castillo and two Hollywood producers.

Photograph taken during the meeting between Kate del Castillo, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán and actor Sean Pen in 2015.

The genesis of that encounter is well known: in 2012, the protagonist of

La Reina del Sur

published an open letter on Twitter saying that he trusted El Chapo more than the government, and suggested that the capo start "trafficking with love." Guzmán acknowledged receipt and ended up turning Del Castillo into a new obsession to complete an old obsession: making a movie about his own life. The first contact between the actress and Chapo's lawyers to discuss the possibility of collaborating in the biographical filming took place in 2014, when Guzmán was already detained in El Altiplano. Since then, she and the capo — with their lawyers as intermediaries — began an exchange that was closely followed by the authorities. However, the story about the beginning of the investigation is candid: according to the documents,The day the authorities received the supposedly anonymous email —September 2015— federal police officers from the Intelligence Division went to the airports of Mexico City and Guadalajara to ask the airlines if there were reservations in the name of Kate del Castillo. And, coincidentally, there was: in a module they were informed that the actress had a flight that would arrive in Guadalajara.

“On September 25, 2015, starting at 10:00 a.m., we set up a permanent surveillance at the airport in the city of Guadalajara,” reads the police report. When the actress arrived at the airport in the capital of Guadalajara, the agents followed her to the hotel and then to the hotel restaurant, they sat at a table next to the one where Del Castillo was having a conversation with one of El Chapo's lawyers, and —always according to the report—they managed to capture fragments of the dialogue. Thus they could hear that the actress supposedly said: "It will be an honor to be 'partner of the gentleman'". By then, the Federal Police knew exactly who they were following: after receiving the anonymous tip, one of the first things they did was look up Kate Del Castillo's biography on Wikipedia,as stated in another of the investigation reports.

According to the chats that the prosecution would later leak to the press, that September 25 was the day that the actress told Guzmán's lawyers that she wanted to bring the actor Sean Penn when they met in person to discuss the project of making a movie. The lawyers had to explain to the capo who Penn was and in what film he appeared (“the one who made the 21-gram film”). They told him he was also an activist and had been "critical of the Bush administration." Guzmán accepted that they all go (Del Castillo, Penn and “los mechudos”, as they called the producers), gave instructions to buy a telephone for the actress to communicate (“you have to see what colors there are to buy a color of woman”, and they agreed on a date for the meeting: October 2 and 3.

In the following days, the policemen returned to both airports to carry out surveillance tasks. On October 2, they saw that the actress landed at 1:20 p.m. in Guadalajara on a private flight accompanied by other people, including Sean Penn. The agents followed them to the hotel, where they barely left their bags and left again in three vehicles along a federal highway towards Tepic, Nayarit. On the way "they entered a gap where an airstrip was located, observing the departure of two planes minutes later," it was noted in the report. The agents arrived that day. What happened from that moment has been narrated both by Del Castillo in the magazine Proceso and by Penn in the magazine Rolling Stone, and both articles appear in the investigation.

Promotional poster for the series starring Kate del Castillo.

On October 2 and 3, 2015, the two actors met with Guzmán Loera in an undisclosed mountainous area of ​​Mexico, where they were watched by more than 100 cartel members.

In his lengthy, self-indulgent and widely questioned chronicle for

Rolling Stone magazine

, published on January 10, 2016, a day after El Chapo was recaptured, Penn speaks of the capo's "warm smile" and his "indisputable charisma." “I traffic more heroin, methamphetamines, cocaine and marijuana than anyone else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, planes, trucks and boats,” the capo told him during the conversation. That interview was the origin of the discord between Kate del Castillo and Sean Penn —who ended up accusing each other—, and a public humiliation for the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto: three months after escaping from the maximum security prison, while he was the criminal most wanted in North America, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel had the luxury of receiving famous visitors to drink tequila,talking about his dream of making a movie about his life and bragging about his criminal achievements in front of Madonna's ex-husband and an actress who had said publicly that she trusted him more than the Mexican government.

When the then prosecutor announced that they had captured Chapo after six months on the run, she said that an important aspect that made it possible to pinpoint his location was "having discovered Guzmán Loera's intention to film a biographical film, for which he established communication with actresses and producers.

One way or another, his statement made everyone involved part of the problem.

obsessions and betrayals

After revealing the drug trafficker's secret meeting with the famous actors, the PGR confirmed to the newspaper Reforma that both were under investigation. However, the only one who had been immersed in an investigation for months was Del Castillo. And a key player in accessing her confidential information was Andrés Granados, the capo's lawyer. One of the first steps carried out by the Public Prosecutor's Office in the investigation was to request information on the chats protected in the litigant's telephone equipment.

These conversations had been captured after an authorization from a criminal court so that the Attorney General's Office could intervene in the lawyer's private communications. Photos with the actress were found on her phone and there were also chats. In one of the conversations, Granados tells the actress: “We are checking the power well. Receive a greeting from mr. And your server". Later, when questioned by the prosecutors, the lawyer explained that it was a power of attorney that Guzmán Loera would give her for lawsuits, collections and negotiations, but he did not specify if it materialized. What the capo had offered the actress, according to various media reports at the time, were the exclusive rights to make a film about her life.

Del Castillo has always insisted that this was what motivated his approach to the drug trafficker: "That seemed like pure gold to me for my career, to do something great and be able to do things," he said in an interview in 2018. But the capo's capture and the publication of the interview in Rolling Stone turned everything upside down. According to the actress, Sean Penn did not tell her that he was going to try to interview him until they were already meeting with the capo, which made her feel betrayed. This is how he told it in the documentary that premiered in 2017, When I met Chapo, where it is implied that the actor's participation would have contributed in some way to the capture of the drug trafficker. This was also believed by Penn's lawyers, who warned Netflix that the broadcast of the documentary put the life of his client at risk. In a book published in 2020 —

El Jefe: The Stalking of Chapo Guzmán

—,

New York Times reporter

Alan Feuer casts doubt on the possibility of Penn's collaboration, as does the claim by Mexican authorities that the meeting between the capo and the actors was key to arresting him again: in reality, says Feuer, the Mexican and US forces already knew where Guzmán was hiding, and that celebrity visit was a hindrance rather than a clue.

Kate del Castillo poses during a shoot in San Miguel de Allende in 2011. Clasos/CON (LatinContent via Getty Images)

But the prosecutor's office continued to imply that version and continued with the investigation. Among other steps, they requested information from the Office of International Affairs of the United States Department of Justice and the Deputy Regional Directorate of the DEA. The latter sent a report where it highlighted: "None of the aforementioned persons has a criminal record in our databases for drug trafficking." In Mexico, the PGR required information on Del Castillo's bank accounts from various institutions through the National Banking and Securities Commission, requested the tax returns from the SAT and certified documentation regarding an "act of inspection carried out on the taxpayer." .

Each of the public property registry offices in the 32 entities of the country were asked to search for real estate or land registered in the name of the actress, a report of all their entries and exits was required from the National Migration Institute. to the country and the legal representative of the Black Berry company was asked for sheets of telephone calls related to the telephone numbers used by Del Castillo.

The authorities spent economic and human resources to try to prove that the protagonist of La Reina del Sur had made a partnership with the leader of the Sinaloa cartel and that he had invested economic resources for the patent of a brand of tequila of the actress and for a film about his life, but the testimonies collected gradually blurred this hypothesis. Despite this, the prosecution continued with the investigation and they leaked to the media what no longer served them to support the case, but generated morbidity in the press, like that conversation where Guzmán Loera told him: "I will take care of you more than in my eyes."

On February 19, 2017, the public ministry agent in charge of the case analyzed each of the pieces of evidence and decided to end the investigation. In the opinion issued, where more than 200 analyzed tests are listed, the non-exercise of criminal action was decreed. With this, the file ended up being filed without even being sent to a judge. Regarding the crime of organized crime, the prosecutor pointed out that it was not proven that the actress had organized with three or more people permanently or repeatedly or that she had belonged to the criminal group. "The evidentiary material also does not show specific acts of intervention by the person involved in accordance with the purposes of the group led by El Chapo Guzmán and they do not even show their claim to be part of said criminal gang," it was stated in the document.

El Chapo Guzmán is escorted by Marine agents during his arrest in 2016. Anadolu Agency (Getty Images)

The only thing that the evidence that the Prosecutor's Office collected for months yielded is that Kate del Castillo was interested in making a film related to Guzmán Loera to document his life.

"This circumstance does not imply the performance of illicit activities, but only reflects that the meeting with the person cited was only for the purpose of making a film and in the exercise of a profession," says the document.

After ruling out crimes for organized crime and money laundering, they analyzed whether Del Castillo had committed crimes against health and for cover-up, but they were also unable to incriminate her because they concluded that the fact that at a certain time she had met with Chapo Guzmán to the realization of a project on his life did not imply that the defendants knew where he was hidden or that they had provided a place to hide him. “There are also no indications with which the way in which the active subjects helped or supported him to hide, so no conduct aimed at hiding or favoring the concealment of said person is observed,” indicated the public ministry.

Kate del Castillo cries during a press conference at Club 51 on December 20, 2018 in Mexico City, Mexico. Actress Kate del Castillo returned to Mexico for a public event after 3 years of absence accused by the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto of alleged links with the most powerful drug trafficker in the world. Carlos Tischler (Getty Images)

Once the ruling of no criminal action was issued, the actress has sought a way to have access to the document and has sought the protection of justice to achieve it. One of the judges who saw her protection concluded that the authorities of the Attorney General's Office used the leaks in the media as "a way to penalize her disproportionately" through an alleged affective relationship with the drug trafficker Joaquín Guzmán Loera, without prior trial. . The actress has also pointed out that the PGR in Enrique Peña Nieto's six-year term put her in danger and even filed a complaint for what she described as official harassment as a result of her encounter with the drug trafficker.

In 2020, reporter Alan Feuer reported that from the high-security prison where he is serving his sentence in the United States, El Chapo was still trying to sell his film.

"I can't say exactly how I know," she explained, "but he is absolutely looking to make the movie to this day."

subscribe here

to the

newsletter

of EL PAÍS México and receive all the informative keys of the current affairs of this country

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-01-16

You may like

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-27T16:45:54.081Z
News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.