I think La Reina del Sur was Castillo's best role. I wrote two years ago she was a powerful role model for women in that role.

Teresa Mendoza in the fictional La Reina del Sur is one of the strongest female character roles ever. Next Sunday she may get competition when Mun2-TV begins airing La Teniente, an action Teleseries about a young woman named Roberta who is the first woman to serve in combat in an elite anti-terrorim unit of the Mexican Marines. She turns out, of course, not to be just young and beautiful, but the toughest and smartest Marine in the group, and she overcomes all the male hostility, gaining everyone's respect. Like Teresa Mendoza, she breaks the "glass ceiling" and should serve as a powerful role model. (If you are thinking a top female drug trafficker can't serve as a role model, watch the series and see if you don't change your mind.)

As Teresa, del Castillo was confident, in charge, not afraid to take anyone on, yet fiercely loyal and protective to those around her. She loved who she wanted when she wanted. She built and ran a multi-million international company with high rise offices and a lot of employees (of course, the foundation of the company and its purpose was to ship drugs, but still, it was a successful business.) She took on the Russian mob and became a partner. Given her brains and her beauty as Teresa Mendoza, why wouldn't El Chapo fall in love with her from the videos? She was his counterpart, only better. His undoing may have been that he confused her television character with the Kate of real life.

It's not hard to do. Although I have only seen a portion of del Castillo's overall work, in the shows I have seen, her roles have similar features: she starts off as weak and/or abused by life, and then gradually gains strength and self-confidence, until she captures her world, and the world of those out to destroy her. She's not only a great strategist in every role, but a loyal leader of her troops with a big heart. What's not to love?

On a related note, I do wonder if El Chapo actually texted those messages. Anabel Hernandez author of Narcoland,told Telesur TV, "El Chapo Guzman can barely read and write. El Chapo Guzman hasn’t even finished elementary school, he can't even write a letter."

In the excellent New Yorker article from 2014, The Hunt for El Chapo, Patrick Radden Keefe wrote:

If you needed to communicate with the boss, you could reach him via B.B.M., BlackBerry’s instant-messaging application. (Guzmán had apparently learned to read and write well enough to communicate in the shorthand of instant messages.) Your message would go not directly to Guzmán, however, but to a trusted lieutenant, who spent his days in Starbucks coffee shops and other locations with public wireless networks. Upon receiving the message, the lieutenant would transcribe it onto an iPad, so that he could forward the text using WiFi—avoiding the cellular networks that the cartel knew the authorities were trolling. The transcribed message would be sent not to Guzmán but to a second intermediary, who, also using a tablet and public WiFi, would transcribe the words onto his BlackBerry and relay them to Guzmán.

Although Guzmán continued to use a BlackBerry, it was almost impossible to track, because it communicated with only one other device. When he received your message, his reply would be relayed back to you through the same indirect means. Many members of the cartel did not realize that when they wrote to the boss and received an answer, every word had been transmitted via two intermediaries. This is sometimes described as a “mirror” system, and it is fiendishly difficult for authorities to penetrate (especially when the transcribers keep moving from one WiFi hot spot to another).

I read a long time ago that two of his lawyers, Óscar Manuel Gómez Núñez and Andrés Granados Flores, were arrested shortly after El Chapo's Altiplano escape. Andrés Granados Flores, is the one who communicated the most with Kate del Castillo.

On Saturday, he gave his official statement to prosecutors. This is his second statement, the first having been given shortly after the July, 2015 prison escape:

On July 13, two days after the escape, Granados was detained by the Agency of Criminal investigation (AIC) of the PGR in Xochimilco, Mexico City; at the same time, also was taken to declare the SEIDO one of his brothers that is agent of the Federal Police. The litigant was left in freedom the next day and the testimonies it rendered to the authority until today are unknown.

Óscar Manuel Gómez Núñez, his chief lawyer who authorities say was at the top in terms of culpability for his active involvement and coordination of others, was arrested about a month earlier with 9 cell phones. Authorities got an order to download the information from the phone:

Gomez Nuñez was arrested in late October in the city of Mexico, accused of having participated in the escape. But nearly a month earlier, the lawyer had been detained by ministerial officials, who took him to testify to the Special Attorney in the organized crime offences. The problem of that statement, admitted a federal source, is that the officers proceeded without an order of presentation or apprehension. "We had him to let go," added the source, "because you have incorporated his statement in the record, to have violated the law, the case would have fallen". However, while declared Gomez Nuñez was requested an order the judge so that they could extract the information carrying on nine phones carrying at the time that he was illegally detained. The judge gave the order.

Gomez Nunez was arrested again on October 21, 2015 and charged in Case no. 58/2015.

Reportedly, Granados Flores' phone calls had been intercepted, including a call that police say helped them find El Chapo. He was released again after making his statement this weekend.

Since cell phone service in the mountains is poor to non-existent, I wonder if for this latest arrest, the police just analyzed the phones seized from the lawyers in touch with Kate rather than relying on actual intercepted phone calls and texts. The phone El Chapo used to text with Kate was provided by one of his lawyers.

While it was Oscar Nunez who received the first request from El Chapo to meet Kate del Castillo (shortly before he escaped from Altiplano), it was Granados that had the most contact with Kate and was present for the meeting between El Chapo, Kate and Sean Penn. Kate del Castillo met with both lawyers in Mexico on September 25, 2015, just about a week before her and Penn's October 2 trip to meet El Chapo.

I still have questions. One is why they were looking for a "pro bono" lawyer to represent El Chapo. Was it because they knew the OFAC restrictions prevented lawyers from accepting money from El Chapo without first applying a license to do so?

The rest will have to wait for another day, as will proof-reading this post. I'm out of time right now.