Emma Coronel Aispuro, the wife of Mexico’s most notorious cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, has been arrested in Virginia on charges of drug trafficking.
In a statement released Monday, the United States Department of Justice said that Coronel, 31 – who is a joint U.S.-Mexican citizen – was arrested at Dulles International Airport and would appear for the first time on Tuesday in a video conference. federal court.
According to court documents, Coronel is charged with conspiring to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana for import into the US.
She has also been charged with conspiring to help arrange Guzmán’s spectacular escape through a mile-long tunnel from Mexico’s high-security Altiplano prison in July 2015.
Court documents allege that Coronel teamed up with Guzmán’s sons to organize the escape plan, which included buying some land near the prison, firearms and an armored truck and smuggling the captured cartel chief into a GPS watch to make sure. get the escape tunnel to reach his cell.
“After Guzmán was rearrested in Mexico in January 2016, Coronel Aispuro is said to have been planning another jailbreak with others ahead of Guzmán’s extradition to the US in January 2017,” the statement said.
Guzmán was sentenced to life plus 30 years at his trial in New York in 2019.
During the trial, Coronel went to court every day, even if the evidence was text messages between her husband and one of his mistresses.
Before her husband was convicted, she told a sympathetic TV interviewer that Guzmán was a “humble” man and complained that the media had made El Chapo “too famous”.
Her arrest is likely to further complicate relations between Joe Biden’s administrations and his Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as security cooperation between Mexico and the United States appears to have cooled.
Mexican prosecutors recently declined to press charges against former Secretary of Defense General Salvador Cienfuegos, who was arrested on landing in Los Angeles last October and charged with protecting a drug cartel.
López Obrador’s government successfully petitioned his return after accusing the United States of acting without their knowledge and not acting as an ally. The country’s congress also passed laws restricting the DEA’s actions in Mexico – a move that U.S. officials warned would paralyze cross-border cooperation on security issues.
“The timing of this arrest is interesting,” said Falko Ernst, senior analyst for Mexico at the International Crisis Group. “In part, this appears to be sending a message from the US stating that their traditional tools for arresting and trying out high-level actors in the US are not a thing of the past – even after Cienfuegos”
American anti-drug agents worked closely together on El Chapo’s arrests in Mexico, where he long dodged the law and became something of an antihero in his home state of Sinaloa and beyond.
Emma Coronel was born in Santa Clara, California and is the daughter of Ines Coronel Barreras, a medium-sized lieutenant in the Sinaloa Cartel.
She grew up in the “Golden Triangle” of Mexico’s Sierra Madre and reportedly met Guzmán at a local festival. She was 17 at the time and Guzmán was 51.
The couple have nine-year-old twin daughters.
While – like many older narco bosses, El Chapo remained unremarkable despite his fame – his wife sought the spotlight. She launched a clothing line – featuring a number of items adorned with El Chapo’s famous mustachioed face – and tried to establish herself as an influencer on social media with a carefully curated Instagram feed. She even appeared briefly on an American reality TV show.
“Bragging rights can be dangerous and time and again those who overexpose themselves and too publicly make themselves targets,” Ernst said.
‘If you want to stay out of prison, standing out is not the right choice. It’s something many old traffickers lived on, but more recent generations seem to have largely forgotten everything. “
Despite his incarceration, Guzmán continues to cast a long shadow in Mexico, and the Sinaloa Cartel, now partly led by his sons, remains a formidable force. When Guzmán’s son Ovidio was arrested in October 2019, cartel shooters captured the city of Culiacán and forced state security forces to release him.
López Obrador defended the move, saying that releasing the younger Guzmán had prevented further bloodshed.
The president of Mexico has always avoided speaking ill of El Chapo, and in late March 2020 he met Guzmán’s elderly mother, Maria Consuelo Loera, on a tour of the Sierra Madre.
López Obrador described the kingpin’s mother as “a pensioner who deserves my full respect – whoever her son may be” and confirmed that she had asked him to help get a US visa so that she could get her son visits in the “Supermax” prison in Florence. , Colorado.