Emma Coronel Aispuro, the wife of Mexico’s most notorious cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, has been arrested in Virginia on drug trafficking charges.
In a statement released Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice said Coronel, 31, who is a joint U.S.-Mexican citizen, was arrested at Dulles International Airport and that she was videotaped in a video conference on Tuesday. the federal court would appear.
According to court documents, Coronel is accused of having a conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana for import into the US.
She is also accused of allegedly conspiring to help arrange Guzmán’s spectacular escape through a kilometer-long tunnel from the high-security Altiplano prison in Mexico in July 2015.
Court documents allege that Coronel worked with Guzmán’s sons to organize the escape site, which includes the purchase of land near the prison, firearms and an armored truck, and the imprisoned cartel chief smuggled a GPS watch to secure that the flight tunnel reaches its cell.
“After Guzmán was re-arrested in Mexico in January 2016, Coronel Aispuro allegedly planned another prison escape with others before Guzmán’s extradition to the US in January 2017,” the statement said.
Guzmán was sentenced to life plus 30 years during his 2019 trial in New York.
During the trial, Coronel attended court every day, even when evidence included text messages between her husband and one of his mistresses.
Before sentencing her husband, 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 and his Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and security cooperation between Mexico and the United States appears to have cooled.
Mexican prosecutors recently denied the charges against former Secretary of Defense Genl. Salvador Cienfuegos, to lead.
The government of López Obrador successfully called for 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 actions of the DEA in Mexico – a move that warned U.S. officials would paralyze cross-border cooperation on security issues.
“The timing of this arrest is interesting,” said Falko Ernst, Mexico’s senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. “In part, it seems to be sending a message from the US, saying that their traditional tools for arresting high-level actors and trying them in the US are not a thing of the past, not even to Cienfuegos. “
U.S. anti-drug agents worked closely with the arrests of El Chapo in Mexico, where he evaded the law for a long time and became a sort of anti-hero in his native Sinaloa and beyond.
Emma Coronel was born in Santa Clara, California and is the daughter of Ines Coronel Barreras, a medium-ranking lieutenant in the Sinaloa cartel.
She grew up in the ‘Golden Triangle’ of Sierra Madre in Mexico and apparently met Guzmán at a local festival. She was then 17 and Guzmán was 51.
The couple has nine-year-old twin daughters.
While El Chapo, despite his fame, like many older Narco bosses maintained a low profile, his wife sought the spotlight. She has launched a range of garments – with some of the items adorned with El Chapo’s famous mustache face – attempting to establish herself as a social media influencer with a carefully crafted Instagram feed. She even briefly appeared in an American TV show.
“Boasting can be dangerous and those who expose and expose themselves too much are repeatedly targeting them,” Ernst said.
‘If you want to stay out of jail, this is not the right way to stand out. This is something that old-school traders used to do, but it seems that more recent generations have mostly forgotten everything. ”
Despite his incarceration, Guzmán casts another long shadow in Mexico, and the Sinaloa cartel, now led in part by his sons, remains a formidable force. When Guzmán, Ovidio’s son, was arrested in October 2019, cartel weapons overran the city of Culiacán and forced the state security forces to release him.
López Obrador defends the move, saying the release of the younger Guzmán could have prevented further bloodshed.
Mexico’s president has always avoided speaking ill of El Chapo, and at the end of March 2020, he will meet Guzmán’s elderly mother, Maria Consuelo Loera, during a tour of the Sierra Madre.
López Obrador described the king’s mother as a pensioner who deserves my full respect – whoever her son may be ‘and confirmed that she requested him to obtain a US visa so that she could take her son to the Supermax prison in Florence. , Colorado.