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CULIACAN, Mexico (AP) – Despite her status as the wife of the world’s most famous drug boss, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Emma Coronel Aispuro lived most of the time in obscurity – until her husband goes to life imprisonment.
Then, suddenly, she was present on social networks. We were talking about launching a fashion line. Even an appearance on a reality TV show dedicated to the families of drug traffickers.
Coronel’s actions have not gone unnoticed. And in the wake of her arrest Monday on charges of conspiring to distribute drugs, there were those who wondered: In embracing the limelight, had Coronel put a target on her back?
Her demeanor was remarkable in part because she had lived a relatively sheltered life until she participated in a grueling trial that gained international attention. But his actions violated unwritten rules about family members, especially wives, by keeping a low profile.
Until the trial, “Emma had remained anonymous like almost all the partners of the Sinaloa cartel capos,” said Adrián López, editor of the Noroeste de Sinaloa newspaper. Then, “she starts to take on a celebrity attitude. … It breaks a tradition of secrecy and a style specifically within the leadership of the Sinaloa cartel.
Late last year, Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernández – who has written extensively on the Sinaloa cartel, including a 2019 book on the diary of the son of cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada – said a source told him that Coronel’s mother Blanca Aispuro was worried about the turn in her daughter’s life.
Concern was also growing among Guzmán’s sons and Sinaloa cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, said Hernández, who was the first journalist to interview Emma Coronel.
“Her mother was also worried that an enemy cartel could harm Emma because she was unleashed, that she was often in the streets, the clubs, excessive in her social life,” Hernández said the source. “Her mother was worried that something like this would happen or that she would become a government target.”
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Guzmán has been married several times; as his trial in New York made clear, he was far from faithful. Sitting in the courtroom, Coronel overheard a woman testify about how she and Guzmán dramatically escaped a nighttime raid on one of her hiding places by Mexican marines.
She described hopping out of bed, locating a secret hatch and walking through a drainage tunnel, with a naked Guzmán leading the way.
“Sometimes I loved her and sometimes I didn’t,” the woman said in tears.
Coronel was there every day smiling, sending kisses to Guzmán, “but in reality they tell me that Emma was very, very mad and very hurt,” Hernández said. “And so at the end of the trial she decided to take revenge and the way to get revenge was to show her husband what he was losing.
Coronel, 31, was born in San Francisco, but grew up in the Durango Mountains on the Sinaloa de Guzmán state border in an impoverished area known as the Golden Triangle.
She and Guzmán married in 2007 at the age of 18. He was 50 years old and one of the most powerful drug dealers in the world. “I don’t imagine that she really had a lot of options to say no, I won’t marry you,” Hernández said.
For a while, Coronel’s father, Ines Coronel Barreras, reportedly took charge of transporting the Sinaloa Cartel’s marijuana across the border in Arizona. In 2013, he was arrested along with one of his sons and other men at a warehouse with guns and hundreds of pounds of marijuana across the border from Douglas, Arizona.
For years, Emma Coronel’s only public image was a photograph from 2007, when she was crowned beauty queen at the festival in Canelas, the city where she grew up. She wore a huge crown and a closed-mouthed smile, and looked directly at the camera.
After their marriage, she disappeared from public view until it was reported in 2011 that she had given birth to their twin daughters in Los Angeles County. On February 22, 2014, she was with Guzmán and their daughters in the Pacific resort of Mazatlan when he was captured by Mexican marines.
Guzmán was sent to the Altiplano maximum security prison near Mexico City while his lawyers fought his extradition. On July 11, 2015, Guzmán escaped through a one-kilometer tunnel that had been dug to the shower in his cell.
In January 2016, Mexican Marines recaptured Guzman in Los Mochis, Sinaloa. The following month, Coronel gave his very first interview to Hernández, repeatedly complaining about the conditions in which Guzmán was being held.
Coronel told Hernández that she learned of her escape from the Altiplano prison through television.
“If I had known something, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep or eat out of desperation,” she says. “I had no idea.”
Guzmán was extradited to the United States – but not before Coronel was involved in planning a new escape attempt that was never successful, according to US prosecutors.
Coronel and its designer wardrobe caused a stir during the El Chapo trial. Photographers nudged each other to capture his arrivals and departures.
At one point, she wore a burgundy velvet blazer that matched the one she sent Guzmán to wear that day. Afterwards, she commissioned a courtroom artist to recreate the show of solidarity – a memory.
Coronel walked around the courtroom with confidence. She played with her hair while waiting for the proceedings to begin and chatted amicably with reporters sitting behind her. She carried crackers and cookies in her purse, sometimes providing snacks for reporters.
Every morning, Guzmán searched for her as he entered the courtroom. He smiled and waved his hand.
One day, she chatted and laughed in the courtroom with Mexican actor Alejandro Edda, who played Guzmán in the Netflix series “Narcos: México”. During the sixth week of the trial, she brought her 7-year-old twin daughters, dressed in matching jeans and white jackets; their father applauds them softly, as if to play with them.
After Guzmán was sentenced – he would be sent back for life over 30 years – Coronel released a statement thanking Guzmán’s lawyers, as well as his mother and sister for taking care of the twins while she attended the trial.
She said the trial had been difficult. His name had been cited in testimony: Dámaso López, one of Guzmán’s former lieutenants, said he had met on several occasions with the sons of Coronel and Guzman to plan the escape of the drug chief from the prison of the Altiplano. And he said Coronel relayed her husband’s messages.
Coronel was unrepentant. “What I can only say about this is that I have nothing to be ashamed of,” she wrote. “I am not perfect but I consider myself a good human being and I never hurt anyone on purpose.”
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López, editor-in-chief of Noroeste, and Ismael Bojórquez, editor-in-chief of Riodoce, a media outlet known for its investigations into the Sinaloa underworld, both expressed shock that Coronel had traveled to and from the United States. after the trial.
Hernández suspects that US authorities have noticed Coronel’s change in lifestyle and have spotted an opportunity to put pressure on her at a time when she may be more open to betraying her husband.
Although Coronel has only posted five photos on Instagram (@therealemmacoronel), it has over 563,000 followers.
For her latest photo, posted in December, she posed in a white wedding dress, part of a fashion collection. And for a photo posted on her July birthday, she was resplendent with lipstick, a black leather jacket – and a crown in her long dark hair, an echo of the beauty queen of a small town that it was so long ago.
“Happy birthday to me,” she wrote.
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Torrens reported from New York and Sherman from Mexico. AP editors Tom Hays in New York and E. Eduardo Castillo in Mexico City contributed to this report.
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