Limelight seen as leading to arrest of El Chapo’s wife
CULIACAN, Mexico — Despite her status as the wife of the world’s most notorious drug boss, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Emma Coronel Aispuro lived mostly in obscurity — until her husband went to prison for life.
Then, suddenly, she was a presence on social media. There was talk of launching a fashion line. Even an appearance on a reality show dedicated to the families of drug traffickers.
Coronel’s actions did not go unnoticed. And in the wake of her arrest Monday on charges that she had conspired to distribute drugs, there were those who wondered: In embracing the limelight, had Coronel put a target on her own back?
Her behavior was notable in part because she had lived a relatively sheltered life until her part in a grueling trial that drew international attention. But her actions violated unwritten rules about family members, especially wives, keeping a low profile. Coronel and her designer wardrobe made a splash at the 2019 trial in Brooklyn. Photographers elbowed each other to capture her arrivals and departures.
Until the trial, “Emma had remained anonymous like practically all of partners of Sinaloa cartel capos,” said Adrian Lopez, executive editor of Sinaloa’s Noroeste newspaper. Then, “she begins to take on more of a celebrity attitude … This breaks a tradition of secrecy and a style specifically within the leadership of the Sinaloa cartel.”
Coronel, 31, was born in San Francisco, but grew up in the mountains of Durango bordering Guzman’s Sinaloa state in an impoverished area known as the Golden Triangle.
She and Guzman married in 2007 when she 18 years old. He was 50 and one of the world’s most powerful drug traffickers.
For a time, Coronel’s father, Ines Coronel Barreras, allegedly took charge of moving the Sinaloa cartel’s marijuana across the border into Arizona. In 2013, he was arrested with one of his sons and other men in a warehouse with guns and hundreds of pounds of marijuana across the border from Douglas, Ariz.
Now, she has been charged with participating in a conspiracy to distribute drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and marijuana in the U.S. She’s also accused of helping plot her husband’s 2015 escape from a prison in Mexico, as well as helping plan another jailbreak once he was recaptured in 2016.