WTF is going on?
A pertinent question considering the world we’re living in
Emma Coronel — Mrs El Chapo to you — was arrested on Monday by the US’s Drug Enforcement Administration and, as is appropriate in the time of corona, appeared in court via video link to explain how she’s running things for her hubby while he sits rotting in the slammer for the next 30 years. She looked great. Like Kim Kardashian when her makeup artist does the “natural” look. Emma, it transpires, was living with her head poking slightly too far above the parapet. And the “war on drugs” took aim and fired a pot shot.
Emma is a narco celebrity. Yes, that’s a thing. Old-school gangsters kept a low profile — relative to the Instagram-worthy life of Emma. They’d quietly go about their business, not calling attention to themselves except under duress, when internecine battles flared up. In which case a dramatic, flagrant, brutal reaction was called for. Bringing everything. But mostly under the radar, and preferably in a tunnel.
Emma Coronel, on the other hand, just wanted to live normally, on Insta, with two accounts, one focussing on travel in which she’s shot fetchingly in presidential suites around the world and OTT birthday parties for the twins, and the other, dedicated to prolific selfies.
For Emma, normal is a long way from her teenage beauty queen days. What a road she’s travelled since her crowning glory at the Canelas Coffee and Guava festival, where she caught the eye of under-the-radar, 51year-old Guzman.
A normal mafia bride, digging her own tunnel to break the father of her twins out of high-security prison in Mexico. A normal girl, getting used to the limelight with daily guest appearances, sporting lovely monochrome outfits, with sunglasses and copious quantities of gum at El Chapo’s trial in Brooklyn in 2019. She needed to parlay that magic publicity dust into a career in front of the camera.
Normal is what she wants. That’s what she said on a VHI reality-TV show last year. It was shot on the deck of a yacht in Miami, where she solemnly sipped bubbles and considered the after-effects of a life on the lam. To be fair, why not get a piece of television action in the Cartel Crew show, when everyone else cashed in on the Sinaola story with multiple TV shows and product lines? Her stepdaughter, El Chapo’s little girl from a previous marriage, is a case in point, marketing a clothing line and a draft beer using her father’s moustache and moniker to diversify the family’s product ranges. I mean, you can’t rely on heroin these days. You have to work your brand! Who you calling shorty now?