"He’s got one hell of a wristwatch.” Interesting observation, Sean Penn. The he Sean Penn is referring to is Alfredo Guzmán, the son of Joaquin Guzmán — better known as El Chapo.

Having received the consent of Rolling Stone magazine, Penn pursued one of Mexico’s most powerful drug traffickers, Guzmán, with the persistence of a Nicholas Spark protagonist. And I’m sure that’s exactly the rosy perception with which he envisioned the world responding to his controversial article. Instead, we have overwhelmingly scrutinized Penn for his willingness to fraternize with a convicted drug lord. In the face of this criticism, Penn’s important message was lost: Guzmán, while criminal, is still only a man. The true problem does not lie solely with Guzmán, but is instead much larger and problematic.

However, Sean Penn did not make it hard for us to draw criticism against his article. Repeatedly throughout Penn’s report of the time he spent preparing and participating in getting close to Guzmán, he seems to slip into a sort of childlike admiration. Not admiring the blood spilled from countless executions or the gravity of Guzmán’s expansive drug empire, of course, but rather for his grace in the midst of it all — the grander of his operations and the precision of his every move.

Penn does not attempt to conceal his wide-eyed observations with forced scrutiny. Instead, he admits Guzmán “does not initially strike (him) as the big bad wolf of lore.” In fact, Penn even lays out the struggle he grappled through when trying to search Guzmán for the “soullessness” that we all crave to find in such villains.

“Soullessness ... wasn’t it soullessness that I must perceive in him for myself to be perceived here as other than a Pollyanna? An apologist? I tried hard, folks. I really did. And reminded myself over and over of the incredible life loss, the devastation existing in all corners of the narco world,” Penn wrote in the article.

His whole article is starting to sound like an argument hoping to serve the purpose of illuminating the world’s perspective of Guzmán, to soften it and quell our fire of insatiable determination to bring Guzmán to justice. The assumption must have been made that pulling one man out of a treacherous and deeply seeded institution’s framework would somehow cause it to crumble to the ground. Or cause it to slowly rot away, taking every other supportive, corrupt soul along with it.

However, we forget to notice that without demand for the “marijuana and poppy” Guzmán built his empire on, he would have remained an impoverished man in the middle of a corrupt country. Granted, drugs do not sell themselves, but they do not buy themselves either.

And we might need to step further back on this issue and acknowledge the fact that the Mexican government has been essentially turning a blind eye as Guzmán and many others line the streets of their country with poison. “Talking about politicians, I keep my opinion to myself. They go do their thing and I do mine.” This was the response Penn recorded when Guzmán was asked about his “dynamic with the Mexican government.”

Sometime before that comment was made and before Mexican officials waived Guzmán’s men through a military checkpoint, Penn had recorded Guzmán’s son, Alfredo, assuring them of the discreteness of their meeting. He offered the explanation, “that they have an inside man who provides notifications when the military’s high-altitude surveillance plane has been deployed.”

With a government that is essentially facilitating a vicious network of domestic and international drug trade, it seems hard to believe Guzmán was ever even captured at all. Perhaps the issue even larger than that, though, is that Mexico is simultaneously destroyed and sustained by illicit drugs.

And that is, while rather unwarranted, the point Sean Penn tried to make by writing this explosive article: we cannot point all of our fingers at one man and expect his erasure to level this colossal industry. We cannot simplify something so nebulous down to being the result of a single man and his actions.

After watching the majority of the world cheer as Guzmán was captured, he found it to be, “an affirmation of the dumb-show of the demonization that has demanded such an extraordinary focus of assets towards the capture or killing of any one individual black hat.”

We are still fighting a War on Terror, long after the death of Osama Bin Laden. We will continue to fight a war on drugs long after Guzmán is good and gone. One person is not the problem, the problem is the system supporting it, which is quite a bit harder to defeat.