Emma Coronel Aispuro, the wife of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has been arrested in the United States for helping her husband run his multibillion-dollar cartel.
According to the US Justice Department, the 31-year-old former beauty queen, was arrested at Dulles International Airport in Virginia and is expected to appear in federal court later.
In a single-count criminal complaint, Coronel was charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana in the US. The Justice Department also accused her of helping her husband escape from a Mexican prison in 2015 and participating in the planning of a second prison escape before Guzman was extradited to the US
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was once Mexico’s most powerful drug lord, with his Sinaloa cartel responsible for smuggling mountains of cocaine and other drugs into the US during his 25-year criminal career. El Chapo was said to have an “army of sicarios” or hitmen who were under orders to kidnap, torture and kill anyone who got in his way.
He had first escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001, leading authorities on a 13-year manhunt before he was recaptured. It was his second major prison break in 2015 that his wife allegedly had a key role in planning. El Chapo managed to escape through a hole under his cell’s shower that led to a mile-long lighted tunnel, where a motorbike on rails was used to speed up his departure.
Court papers say the plot included buying a piece of land near the prison, as well as firearms and an armoured truck, and smuggling the drug lord a GPS watch so his allies could “pinpoint his exact whereabouts so as to construct the tunnel with an entry point accessible to him”.
Prosecutors say Coronel Aispuro worked with Guzman’s sons and a witness, who is now co-operating with the US government, to organise the construction of the tunnel. She is also accused of planning yet another prison escape before Guzman was extradited to the US in January 2017.
After Guzman was rearrested following his escape, Coronel lobbied the Mexican government to improve her husband’s prison conditions. She regularly attended Guzman’s trial, even when testimony implicated her in his prison breaks. He was sentenced to life behind bars in the US in 2019.
Coronel’s father, Ines Coronel Barreras, was also arrested in 2013 with one of his sons and several other men in a warehouse with hundreds of pounds of marijuana across the border from Douglas, Arizona. Before the arrest, the US Treasury had announced financial sanctions against him for his alleged drug trafficking.
The couple, separated in age by more than 30 years, have been together since at least 2007, and their twin daughters were born in 2011.
Mike Vigil, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s former chief of international operations, said Coronel “has been involved in the drug trade since she was a little girl. She knows the inner workings of the Sinaloa cartel.”
He indicated that she could be willing to cooperate because “She has a huge motivation, and that is her twins.”
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