WASHINGTON (AP) – The wife of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was arrested Monday at an airport in Virginia on charges of international drug trafficking, the Justice Department said, detailing how she helped her man’s daring escape from a Mexican prison.
Emma Coronel Aispuro, 31, a U.S. and Mexican dual citizen, has been arrested at Dulles International Airport and is expected to appear in federal court in Washington on Tuesday.
She is charged with a single-lawsuit charge of conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana in the US. The Department of Justice also accuses her of helping her husband out of a Mexican prison in 2015 and participating in the planning of a second prison. escaped before Guzman was extradited to the US in January 2017.
Coronel Aispuro remains in custody, and it is not immediately clear whether she has a lawyer who can comment on the allegations.
As Mexico’s most powerful drug lord, Guzman escapes through an entrance under the shower into his cell to a mile-long (1.6-kilometer-long) illuminated tunnel with a motorcycle on track. According to prosecutors, the planning for the escape was extensive, and his wife played a key role.
According to court documents, Coronel Aispuro worked with Guzman’s sons and a witness, who is working closely with the U.S. government, to organize the construction of the underground tunnel that Guzman used to escape from the Altiplano prison in Mexico. The plot involved the purchase of a piece of land near the prison, firearms and an armored truck and smuggled a GPS watch for him so that they could ‘determine exactly where the tunnel was to be built with’ an access point that was accessible to him ‘, read the court documents. say.
Guzman was sentenced in 2019 to life in prison. His Sinaloa cartel was responsible for smuggling mountains of cocaine and other drugs to the United States during his 25-year reign, prosecutors said in recent court documents. They also said that his ‘army of sicarios’, or ‘beaten men’, was on command to kidnap, torture and kill everyone in his path.
Coronel Aispuro, a former beauty queen for teenagers, regularly attended Guzman’s trial, even when evidence put her in a harsh light. The two, who are more than thirty years old, have been together since at least 2007 and share twin daughters, who were born in 2011.
Her father, Ines Coronel Barreras, was arrested in 2013 along with one of his sons and several other men in a warehouse containing hundreds of pounds of marijuana across the border from Douglas, Arizona. Months earlier, the US Treasury had announced financial sanctions against Coronel Barreras for its alleged drug trafficking.
After Guzman was arrested after his escape, Coronel Aispuro urged the Mexican government to improve her husband’s prison conditions. And after he was convicted in 2019, she started going to a clothing line in his name.
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Associated Press author Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed to this report.