Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán put it simply to Sean Penn: “The day I don’t exist,” drug trafficking is “not going to decrease in any way at all.”
Yet the Sinaloa Cartel boss’s recapture has focused a lot of attention on Sean Penn and not so much on how and whether it will make the United States and Mexico safer, or more free of drugs. This would ostensibly be why Guzmán’s arrest is such a big deal, why the U.S. and Mexico are fighting a drug war that has turned regions of Mexico into war zones and led to countless deaths and imprisonments on both sides of the border.
Such a war should have a really good rationale, given the costs.