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Thursday, June 12, 2008

Salma and Penelope: we didn’t hang with narcos

By Jeremy Schwartz | Thursday, June 12, 2008, 10:11 AM

Bandidas.jpg
Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz have been forced into damage control mode after a protected witness told Mexican officials the pair stayed at a swank hacienda - that happened to be owned by a top Mexican drug traffickers - while filming the 2004 flick Bandidas.

The witness said the movie stars were guests of Sergio Villarreal, “El Grande,” who is linked to the powerful Beltran Leyva organization.

Hayek told reporters that the production office for Bandidas set up the lodging in the mountainous state of Durango, and that she never met the owners. Cruz said she never stayed at the hacienda and her rep angrily chastised the Mexico City daily El Universal, which reported the allegations earlier this week. “We are very surprised because we would have liked to have been asked about this before it was published,” said Antonio Rubial. “We all know how these things work in Mexico and to what point the source is reliable.”

El Universal claimed it had reached out Cruz before reporting the story, but that it got no answer. (After reading the Mexican newspapers for two years, I can say that it’s common practice for papers to print allegations without comments from the accused and then to print a follow-up story the next day with the response.)

Several Mexican stars have been linked to narcos in the Mexican press recently, mostly performers who reportedly gave private concerts. Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the son of a Colombian drug lord, wrote in a recent book that Juan Gabriel performed for a narco party.

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