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Emma Coronel Aispuro, wife of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico, was arrested in Virginia on drug trafficking charges, the US Department of Justice said.
In a statement released Monday, the Justice Department said Coronel, 31, who is a joint citizen of the United States and Mexico, was arrested at Dulles International Airport and was scheduled to make her initial appearance in federal court on Tuesday through a videoconference.
According to court documents, Coronel is accused of conspiring to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana for importation into the United States.
She has also been charged with allegedly conspiring to help organize Guzmán’s spectacular escape through a mile-long tunnel from the Altiplano high-security prison in Mexico in July 2015.
“After Guzmán was arrested again in Mexico in January 2016, it is alleged that Coronel Aispuro became involved in planning another prison break with others prior to Guzmán’s extradition to the United States in January 2017,” says the release.
Guzmán was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years at his trial in New York in 2019.
His Sinaloa cartel was responsible for smuggling mountains of cocaine and other drugs into the United States during his 25-year reign, prosecutors said in recent court documents. They also said that their “army” had orders to kidnap, torture and murder anyone who got in their way.
Throughout his trial, Coronel attended court every day. Before her husband’s life sentence, she told a sympathetic Mexican television interviewer that Guzmán was a “humble” man and complained that the media had made El Chapo “too famous.”
At one point, prosecutors censured Coronel for having a banned cell phone in the vicinity of the courtroom, and what court documents call “unauthorized contact” and “inadmissible” with Guzmán.
Emma Coronel was born in Santa Clara, California, a United States citizen, and is the daughter of Inés Coronel Barreras, a middle-ranking lieutenant of the Sinaloa cartel.
He grew up in the “Golden Triangle” of the Sierra Madre de México and reportedly met Guzmán at a local festival. She was 17 at the time and Guzmán 51.
The couple have two nine-year-old twin daughters.
His arrest is likely to further complicate relations between the governments of Joe Biden and his Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and comes as security cooperation between Mexico and the United States appears to have cooled off.
Mexican prosecutors recently refused to press charges against former defense secretary General Salvador Cienfuegos, who was arrested upon landing in Los Angeles last October and charged with protecting a drug cartel.
The López Obrador government successfully requested his return, having accused the United States of acting without his knowledge and of not acting as an ally. The country’s congress also passed laws limiting the DEA’s actions in Mexico, a move US officials warned would cripple cross-border cooperation on security issues.
“The timing of this arrest is interesting,” said Falko Ernest, senior analyst for Mexico at International Crisis Group. “In part, this seems to send a message from the United States that its traditional tools of arresting high-level actors and trying them in the United States are not yet a thing of the past, even after Cienfuegos.”
US drug agents worked closely on El Chapo’s arrests in Mexico, where he long evaded the law and became something of an antihero in his home state of Sinaloa and beyond.
While, like many older narco bosses, El Chapo kept a low profile despite his fame, his wife sought the spotlight. She launched a clothing line, with some of the items patterned with El Chapo’s well-known mustachioed face, and tried to establish herself as a social media influencer with a carefully curated Instagram feed. He even appeared briefly on an American reality television show.
“Showing off can be dangerous, and time and time again, those who expose themselves too much and in public become targets,” Ernst said.
“If you want to stay out of prison, standing out is not the way to go. It’s something a lot of old-school traffickers used to live with, but newer generations seem to have completely forgotten. “
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