Kate del Castillo, who starred in “The Queen of the South”, a Spanish-language soap opera produced by Telemundo about the rise of a woman who becomes the most powerful drug trafficker in southern Spain, is under investigation by Mexican authorities for obstruction of justice after she met with Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán while he was on the run.
Del Castillo's personal relationship with Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán began in 2014, when she was contacted by his lawyers when he was behind bars at El Altiplano prison with the purpose of inviting her to produce a film and a book about the life of the world's most notorious drug kingpin. Back in January 2012, the Mexican actress had expressed her admiration for Guzmán on a letter inviting the drug lord to "smuggle with good."
She exchanged letters with Guzmán through his lawyers: Oscar Manuel Gómez Núñez, now in prison over his participation in the escape of Guzmán from prison in July 2015, and Andrés Granados Flores, in charge of the legal strategy to avoid Guzmán's extradition. When El Chapo escaped from El Altiplano on July 11, 2015, the actress posted the following message on Twitter: “I believe more in El Chapo Guzmán than in the governments that hide truths from me, even if they are painful...”
In October 2015 Del Castillo flew from Los Angeles to Guadalajara, where she met Granados, and they went together to Tepic, from where they traveled to an area known as the “Golden Triangle” to have her first meeting with Guzmán to talk about his life. Ever since he started sending her gifts and even asked her to talk to the producers and the directors of the movie “El Chapo: The Escape of the Century” so that the film (directed by Axel Uriegas and produced by Dragon Films Mexico) was not released in January.
Del Castillo told her friends that Guzmán had named her “boss and coordinator” of his autobiographical movie and she contacted an Argentinian producer to ask him to write the script for the film. She also facilitated a meeting between Guzmán and U.S. actor Sean Penn in Tamazula, a community in Durango, about two months before Guzmán's recapture last Friday in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, after six months on the run. Authorities are also investigating Penn, who interviewed him for Rolling Stone magazine.
The interview helped give law enforcement a lead on tracking and capturing Guzmán.