Shawn Moran, Border Patrol Agent, Criticizes Sean Penn’s ‘Celebrating’ Of ‘El Chapo’ In Rolling Stone Article

A Border Patrol union spokesperson dissed Sean Penn’s profile Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán for Rolling Stone, El Chapo Speaks, adding to a cacophony of scoffs from celeb-focused media outlets, a how-I-would-have-done-it from the NYT, and a condemnation from at least one presidential candidate. In the article, Penn describes Guzmán as one of Mexico’s “two presidents,” and grapples with what he sees as America’s contradictory role as both the world’s most avid consumer of illegal narcotics and its most zealous devotee of the War on Drugs.

“Sean Penn and others who would celebrate this man or capitalize on his situation only further put law enforcement on both sides of the border in danger,” Border Patrol Agent and NBPC union Spokesperson Shawn Moran tells Breitbart.

For the tough-on-crime crowd, Penn is the posterboy for Hollywood liberalism and activism, his chiseled features alternating from the silver screen to refugee camps of Haiti, to the handshake of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (Penn acknowledges his penchant for “guilt by association.”)

Even tinsel-town commentators are poking fun, from “Oscar-winning actor sticking his nose where it doesn't belong” to snarky takedowns of Penn, from his preoccupation with his penis to his penchant for off-beat prose.

While these pop-culture exhales will quickly disappear, what is to come of the conversation of America’s Drug War?

At one point Penn even accuses Mexican military units of collaborating with the narco. Is Penn’s piece a celebration of El Chapo, or a lament of Mexico’s actual president, Enrique Peña Nieto, the target of protests depicted in one scene of the Rolling Stone article?

“Outside the restaurant windows, a chanting march of Mexican-Americans flowed by in protest against the Peña Nieto government's asserted violations of human rights, having allowed their country of origin to fall prey to a narco regime,” Penn writes.

Instead of engaging in Penn’s assertion that Guzmán is running a shadow government, that Mexico’s leaders have failed to solve the crisis and that Americans are complicit or even supportive of this in this through a combination of consumption and policy choices, presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) scoffed at Penn’s reportage as “fawning.”

"If one of these American actors who have benefited from the greatness of this country, who have made money from our free enterprise system, want to go fawn all over a criminal and a drug trafficker in their interviews, they have a constitutional right to do it," Rubio told ABC's This Week according to The Hill. "I find it grotesque."