BEAUTY BEHIND EL CHAPO
US-born pageant gal who became Mex drug lord’s wifee – and his top defender
SHE’S a voluptuous ravenhaired stunner with perfect skin and pouty lips. A former teenage beauty queen who was born in California, she is fond of racy bikinis and tight jeans. At 27, Emma Coronel Aispuro is also a devoted mother to twin girls.
And she is also the faithful wife of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the world’s most notorious drug trafficker, better known as “El Chapo.”
As the 62-year-old drug lord languishes in a holding cell at the Manhattan Detention Center awaiting trial on several counts of murder and drug trafficking, Emma took to social media this month to profess her undying devotion and love for her husband, who is a well-known philanderer and father to 19 children with at least six other women.
On Jan. 21, two days after he arrived in New York, Emma tweeted in Spanish, “The night arrives and my heart remembers you, here where you always reside and where no one will erase you or replace you.”
Although they may seem an unlikely match, they are united in their fight to resist American justice tooth and nail.
“Emma is really his mouthpiece,” said Jack Riley, formerly the highest-ranking special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration who tracked El Chapo for the last 25 years.
El Chapo placed a $100,000 bounty on Riley’s head, literally — offering to pay anyone who would cut it off.
“He’s a genius at p.r., and he is putting Emma up to all of this, to complain about his treatment and to stall for time. It actually worked for a while,” he told The Post in an exclusive interview.
Before El Chapo was extradited to New York this month, the slippery head of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel was incarcerated at a maximum-security prison in Mexico.
“They are punishing him for escaping in the past,” Emma told an interviewer for Telemundo, the Mexican TV network, last year.
For her first TV appearance, Emma traded in her risqué wardrobe for a chaste, buttoned-up blouse and dark suit, with her long hair spilling over her breasts.
“They [the guards] don’t let him sleep, and he has no privacy, not even to go to the bathroom,” said a somber, soft-spoken Emma, who has not yet visited her husband in his Manhattan lock-up.
El Chapo — Mexican slang for “shorty” — twice escaped maximum-security cells, most recently in July 2015, when he slithered out of one of Mexico’s most notorious prisons through an elaborate, mile-long tunnel.
He eluded the ensuing manhunt for almost six months, rising to near mythic status as the country’s most famous fugitive.
While his Sinaloa network sells more drugs today than Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar did at the height of the Medellín Cartel in the 1980s, El Chapo, like Escobar, courted the poor. Fashioning himself a modern-day Robin Hood, he infused millions of dollars into community programs in impoverished rural areas, where he built soccer fields and waterpurification plants.
Shortly after her husband’s cap- ture in a predawn shootout with Mexican naval forces in January 2016, Emma became the star of a p.r. campaign orchestrated by El Chapo to draw attention to his deteriorating health and harsh imprisonment.
Riley, who retired from the DEA this year, said he shadowed Emma on a handful of trips to Washington, where she pleaded El Chapo’s case before the Organization of American States and other humanitarian groups.
On her most recent trip in Oc- tober, Emma, accompanied by one of El Chapo’s lawyers, tried to make the case that her husband, the leader of a cartel responsible for the torture, kidnapping and murder of tens of thousands, was himself a victim of human-rights abuses.
“And after her meeting in Washington, she headed to the mall,” Riley said. “She’s a real party freak who has access to a lot of money.”
One of her favorite places to shop was the Nordstrom at the Pentagon City Mall, across the street from DEA headquarters.
EMMA Coronel Aispuro was born on July 2, 1989, outside San Francisco, while her Mexican mother, Blanca Estela Aispuro, was visiting relatives there. Although Emma has described her father as a cattle rancher and farmer, the family has links to the Sinaloa Cartel. According to Riley, her dad, Ines Coronel Barreras, was a top drug trafficker and one of her brothers worked as a pilot for El Chapo.
Emma grew up in a remote Mexican village, where she met El Chapo at a party her father or- ganized when she was 17.
“El Chapo was attracted to Emma because she was as pure as the driven snow,” Riley said, noting the drug lord never bothered divorcing two previous wives before marrying her. (The other spouses lead low-profile lives in Mexico.)
But it wasn’t exactly love at first sight.
“He was dancing with another girl,” Emma told a reporter. “I was dancing with my boyfriend . . . and we crossed paths right in the center of the dance floor. He flirtatiously smiled at me. After a while, a person told me, ‘The man asks if you want to dance with him.’ And I said, ‘OK.’ Because in the ranchos, even though you have a boyfriend, you can dance with every person who asks you to dance. So I said, ‘ Of course!’ ”
It would be several months before she saw El Chapo again. In the meantime, he made a point of paying to ensure her victory as queen of the Coffee and Guava Festival in the town of Canelas, according to Mexican press reports.
Emma has denied El Chapo had anything to do with her win. She said that since her coronation, where she appeared in a diamond-encrusted crown and long diamond earrings, a white sash draped around her elaborate gown, El Chapo has called her his queen. And despite his wellknown philandering, Emma says she is the true love of his life.
Emma also claimed she had no idea the man she married on her 18th birthday was the world’s largest and most lethal trafficker of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and marijuana, even though their wedding attracted all of the local drug lords.
During the tequila-soaked festivities, a fight broke out between El Chapo’s men and a member of the drug-trafficking Beltran Leyva family, led by Alfredo Beltran Leyva, known as “El Mochomo” or “The Desert Ant.”
“One of the Beltran Leyva sons was slapped in the face at the wedding, which caused a major rift,” Riley said, adding that after the fight, El Mochomo seized control of the Chicago drug market “behind El Chapo’s back,” and the two families became rivals.
AT the time of his marriage to Emma, El Chapo, then 52, was already a fugitive wanted by Mexico, the US and Interpol. He had escaped from a high-security Mexican prison in 2001 and was living in a series of hideouts, some equipped with elaborate tunnels for quick escapes.
He would arrange to meet his new wife at a compound of houses connected by underground tunnels that he owned in the resort city of Cabo San Lucas on Mexico’s Baja peninsula, Riley said.
But most of the time, he was on the run, traveling without Emma and with an entourage of his most
[El Chapo] isi a genius at p.r., and he is putting Emma up to all of this.
Former DEA agent Jack Riley (above)
faithful sicarios, or hit men, and a cook who doubled as a prostitute.
“They were the sexiest cooks you had ever seen,” Riley said. “It’s really hard to cook tortillas in the middle of the jungle, but that’s not what they were there for.”
In fact, it was his thirst for hookers that would lead to El Chapo’s undoing, Riley said. El Chapo would provide his girlfriends with cellphones, which the DEA and Mexican authorities were able to monitor to track his movements.
His meeting with actor Sean Penn and Mexican actress Kate del Castillo in October 2015 cemented his downfall, allowing authorities to trace his hiding place.
“This whole meeting was to [sleep] with Kate del Castillo,” Riley said. Del Castillo had starred in a reality show about drug trafficking, and El Chapo was infatuated, Riley said.
Emma, who spends most of her time in Mexico City, said she was not jealous of del Castillo.
“He’s my daughters’ father, and I believe that I have already demonstrated that I will follow himhim anywhere,” she told Telemundo. o.
Four years into their marriage, Emma was sent by El Chapo to Los Angeles to give birth to twin girls in 2011. El Chapo wanted his daughters born on US soil as a gesture of defiance to the DEA.A.
There were no charges against Emma, and she delivered the babies — María Joaquina and Emali Guadalupe — at a hospital in Lancaster, north of LA. She filled out the birth certificates, leaving the father’s name blank, and returnedned to Mexico with the girls.
“We intercepted El Chapo onn a cellphone saying that he really had the gringos by the neck,” recalled led Riley, who considers the drug lord ord “the smartest and most significant ant bad guy in recent history.” There ere was a $5 million bounty for El Chapo’s arrest at the time.
“We heard him making fun of us,” Riley said. “And there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it.”