A Brief Look At El Chapo

Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, or El Chapo, runs one of the most infamous drug cartels in the world (Penn 2016). He is also one of the most wanted men in America due to the excessive amounts of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana from his drug cartels and come into the United States. El Chapo, despite being wanted by the Mexican government, did an exclusive interview with Sean Penn as a part of Rolling Stone magazine (Penn 2016). In this interview, he expressed his life and his opinions on his drug business and drug problem in Mexico.
Probably one of the more interesting factors about the interview was the focus on El Chapo describing his childhood. Coming from a very poor family, he expressed how he and his family worked hard to make a living (Penn 2016). He explained where he grew up and how people in his neighborhood would turn to drugs, and, eventually he turned to drugs. Since making a living off of drugs, he described how his life for him and his family has improved. This parallelism between the rich and the poor classes is based off of Karl Marx’s theory of
Almost all drugs are illegal in our country and, even from a young age, we teach our children to “Say No to Drugs.” It is accepted into our culture that anyone that does drugs is bad and anyone who breaks the law is bad. It is something that we are taught and we accept. By displaying El Chapo in a negative light and as a “public enemy” the media is able to push their own agenda and convince people that drugs are bad. Because El Chapo does drugs and sells them, he is a bad person and is making things worse for the America (Schuppe 2015). On the other hand, El Chapo explains about where he grew up and how, for him, he saw other people in his society use drugs to make a living (Penn 2016). So for him, learning from society that drugs are bad and that, as a culture, we should “Say no to drugs” was not