Emma Coronel Aispuro turned brunette again last week for her mugshot.
The glamorous beauty queen-wife of Mexico’s most infamous drug trafficker had last appeared in public as a blonde, with her hair falling down bareback in a glamorous, white lace wedding dress she modeled on Instagram for Mexican designer Benito Santos. In another photo, she’s modeling a hip, sparkly purple dress.
But as she prepares to take out high-ranking members of the Sinaloa cartel, including her own stepsons, Coronel Aispuro was forced to take a more austere look at boring prison vegetables, her pouty lips free of red lipstick.
“She definitely cooperates,” a federal law enforcement source told The Post, adding that Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s wife is a likely candidate for witness protection.
“Emma wants to be far from the violence and has always wanted to live in the US,” said the source. She was born in California and has dual US / Mexican citizenship.
Coronel Aispuro, 31, turned herself into authorities in Washington earlier this week and is facing more than 10 years in prison when convicted on drug trafficking charges. She is also accused of helping 63-year-old Guzman escape from a high-security Mexican prison in 2015, and of helping plan another escape before he was extradited to the US in 2017, according to court documents.
The leggy brunette, fond of flashy designer clothes, was a fixture at her husband’s trial in Brooklyn federal court in 2019. At the time, The Post reported that she was under federal investigation for her help in running the cartel. which is now in the lead, the source said, by stepsons Ovidio Guzman Lopez, 30, Ivan Archivaldo Guzman, 37, Jesus Alfredo Guzman Salazar, 34, and Joaquin Guzman Lopez, whose age is unknown.
Along the way, the former journalism student and aspiring model has amassed nearly 600,000 Instagram followers. She posts glamorous photos of herself in low-cut blouses and chandelier diamond earrings, sharing Instagram stories of her luxury Venice vacation shortly after Guzman was sentenced to life in a maximum-security federal prison in Colorado in July 2019. There were videos of a gondola. rides and dinners overlooking the canals. A video showed two glasses of white wine in an open-air restaurant, but it wasn’t clear if she was on a date.
Previous photos uploaded to her social media sites of her husband during the trial showed the brunette in skimpy bikinis on windy beaches. Others showed her in skinny jeans paired with stilettos and Prada handbags, standing amid a fleet of high-end sports cars. Those photos and the video stories have since been removed.
Following the trial, Coronel Aispuro also registered the trademark “El Chapo Guzman” according to public records to sell a clothing line, cell phone cases and hats.
While it is unclear whether the commercial venture continued, Coronel Aispuro has retained many of her fans. Shortly after news of her arrest on Monday, many of those social media followers left heart emojis next to photos of Coronel Aispuro in a sleek black leather jacket, a gold crown on her head, and enhanced red lips.
Her followers were shocked that “la Reinita” – the little queen – who also made a guest appearance on VH1’s “Cartel Crew” two years ago, had been arrested. “Is it true that Emma is in prison?” one of her Instagram followers asked. “Free the queen,” wrote another.
Coronel Aispuro, the mother of 9-year-old twins Emali Guadalupe and Maria Joaquina, is represented by a team of lawyers led by Manhattan attorney Jeffrey Lichtman, who also defended her husband.
“She had her lawyer lined up before she got on the plane to turn herself in,” the source told The Post. “Her first priority is to protect her children and stay in the US.”
She has long denied any knowledge of her husband’s drug trade. But an FBI agent who questioned more than 100 members of the Sinaloa cartel said in court documents that “Coronel was aware of multiple tons of cocaine shipments, multi-kilo heroin production, multi-ton marijuana shipments, and tons of cocaine. amount of methamphetamine shipments. ” After visits to her husband in Mexican prisons, she forwarded messages to his trusted deputies, court documents say.
At Guzman’s trial in Brooklyn, Damaso Lopez Nunez, the drug lord’s longtime lieutenant, testified that El Chapo contacted him shortly after his capture by Mexican Marines in February 2014. Lopez said his boss asked him to “be the mother of the twins, ”referring to Coronel.
Coronel Aispuro was born in July 1989 near San Francisco, but grew up in a remote area of northwestern Mexico surrounded by pine forests. Her father, Ines Coronel Barrera, was a rancher in the region and a dreaded drug lord who worked for Guzman. The daughter met Guzman when she was a teenager, and a contestant in a beauty pageant at the Coffee and Guava Festival in the village of Canelas in 2007.
Guzman, then 50, fell for her on the spot, although the marriage was widely seen as a way to cement Ines Coronel Barreras’ position within Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel. Barreras was convicted of gun charges and marijuana trafficking in 2017 and is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Mexico.
Since Guzman’s extradition to the US, the Sinaloa Cartel has been dominated by the eldest of his 15 children, known as ‘Los Chapitos’. In 2019, their fight against rival drug gang, Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion, turned particularly brutal, killing more than 2,000. In October of that year, when Mexican authorities captured Ovidio Guzman Lopez – known as El Raton or “the mouse” – the threat of violence was deemed so high that they let him go.
Lichtman declined comment when contacted by The Post.