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Best-selling novelist Don Winslow — who’s written about Mexico’s drug war in “The Cartel,” being made into a film by Ridley Scott — has slammed Sean Penn’s interview with drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman as “horribly misguided.”

“Penn has a reputation of not shying away from controversy . . . I was hoping that he would ask Guzman questions that would matter,” Winslow writes in a column for Hollywood blog Deadline.

But “Penn’s article had nothing to do with the 40-year, trillion-dollar failure that is the ‘war on drugs’ — it was instead a brutally simplistic and unfortunately sympathetic portrait of a mass murderer.”

And “An entry-level journalist would have pushed Guzman on the many millions of dollars in bribes he has paid to co-opt police, judges and politicians, about his treaty with the sadistic and hideously violent Zetas [gang] when it was convenient to him . . . Incredibly, there were no questions asked about the murders of many Mexican journalists with their horrifically mutilated bodies left out in public like garbage.”

Winslow writes, “Instead, we hear about how nice Guzman’s shirt is, how he comes across as a bashful teenager . . . he loves his children . . . he provides ‘much needed services in the Sinaloa Mountains, funding everything from food and roads to medical relief.’ ”

Penn has said his interview was “a failure” because it didn’t spark debate about the war on drugs, but Winslow adds: “He failed to understand who he was interviewing, the crimes his subject committed and the responsibility he had to ask real questions.”

Winslow will only call the drug lord by his real name, Joaquin Guzman.

“I resist the cute sobriquet of ‘Chapo.’ He is not one of the Seven Dwarfs . . . He’s a mass murderer.”