On November 30, 2021, Emma Coronel Aispuro was sentenced to three years in prison, after pleading guilty to drug trafficking and money laundering charges having to do with her husband's narcotics organization on June 10, 2021. And who is her husband? Her husband is none other than Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, the infamous head of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. The couple have been married since 2007. She stood by his side throughout his trial in the United States, which ended on February 12, 2019, with the jury finding him guilty on all counts. He was later sentenced to serve life in prison. Emma's own problems with the courts started on February 22, 2021, when she was arrested at Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
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She was charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana. In addition, she was charged with helping to plan her husband's 2015 prison escape via an elaborate system of tunnels and helping to plan a second prison escape before El Chapo was extradited to the US. Find out more about the woman behind one of the world's most notorious drug traffickers and what led to her prison sentence.
She was born in the US and has dual citizenship.
Born in the US to Blanca Estela Aispuro and Inés Coronel Barreras, Emma has dual citizenship. It's often written that her birthday is on July 2, 1989, but according to FBI records, she was born on July 3, 1989, in Northern California.
Her uncle was tight with El Chapo.
She is the niece of Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel Villarreal, one of El Chapo's former top deputies. Villarreal was killed in 2010 during a shootout with the Mexican army. This connection puts into perspective how Emma Coronel and El Chapo came to cross paths.
They met when she was only 17.
They met in 2006 at a party in Mexico when she was only 17 years old. Emma described their meeting during an interview.
"He was dancing with another girl," she recalled. "I was dancing with my boyfriend — at that time I had a boyfriend — and we crossed paths right in the center of the dance floor. He flirtatiously smiled at me. After a while a person told me, ‘The man asks if you want to dance with him.’ And I said, ‘OK.’ Because in the ranchos, even though you have a boyfriend, you can dance with every person who asks you to dance. So I said, ‘Of course!’"
She's a former beauty queen.
Obviously, the woman is gorgeous, but she is an actual former beauty queen. In 2007, she won the title of Miss Coffee and Guava in Durango, Mexico. During her campaign for Miss Coffee and Guava, she and El Chapo announced their plans to get married, and because of that a lot of people think that it wasn't just her good looks and grace that won her the title. She disagrees.
They were married on her 18th birthday.
On the day she turned 18 years old, she and El Chapo got married. It was a quiet affair held in Angostura, Canelas County, Durango, Mexico. “I would say what won me over was his way of talking, how he treated me, the way we began to get along—first as friends and from that came everything else,” Emma said in an interview.
She is not El Chapo's first wife.
There are conflicting reports about whether she is El Chapo's third or fourth wife, but most sources say that she is his third wife. He, of course, is her first and only husband to date, and they are still currently married despite his life prison sentence.
There is a significant age gap between the two.
There is a big age difference between husband and wife. El Chapo is believed to have been born on April 4, 1957, and Emma was born in 1989. That would make him about 32 years older than she is.
She hadn't even graduated high school when she got married.
She told the Los Angeles Times that after she got married, she moved to Culiacán, Mexico, where El Chapo was based, and finished high school. She then went on to study journalism. Given the nature of her husband's work, she didn't see him often.
She gave birth to twins in 2011.
In 2011, Emma gave birth to twin daughters at the Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster, California. The girls' birth certificates do not list who the father is, but it's a pretty safe bet to say their dad is Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.
Like mother, like daughters.
Because the twin girls were born in the US, they have dual citizenship, just like their mother. They were born on August 15, 2011. It's crazy to think of what they've had to go through in their short lives and what they will continue to go through simply because of who their parents are.
She worries about the challenges her daughters will face.
She has admitted that her perspective changed after her daughters were born. “When one has children, the way we think and see life changes,” she said. “For me it was then when I started thinking about the situation, that everything was kind of complicated.”
She was upset by the whole Kate Castillo situation, but not for the reasons you might think.
In 2015, Mexican actress Kate del Castillo took actor Sean Penn to meet El Chapo after El Chapo had escaped Mexican prison. Later, Sean wrote an article about the encounter for Rolling Stone. A lot of people thought that Emma would be upset by the flirty texts that Kate and El Chapo had exchanged, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
"At no time did I feel jealous of Kate," Emma said.
What did upset her was Kate's 'betrayal.'
Kate's production company had been granted the rights to a video that was taken of El Chapo discussing how he had been involved in the drug trade since he was 15 years old. That video was subsequently released and eventually used in the trial against him. According to Emma, at no time did El Chapo believe that the video would be published. He thought it was being used as research for a film about his life that he wanted Kate to be involved in producing.
She got to see her husband more when he was in jail than when he wasn't.
After eluding law enforcement for more than a decade, Joaquín Guzmán Loera was captured on February 22, 2014, in Mazatlán, Mexico. A month after his arrest, Emma and her daughters were able to visit him at Altiplano prison. According to Emma, it was during his time at Altiplano that she was able to see him most. Then he escaped through an elaborate tunnel system on July 11, 2015. He was caught again in January 2016 and extradited to the US in January 2017, where he was tried and sentenced to life in prison.
Emma Coronel Aispuro was arrested on February 22, 2021.
Emma was arrested at Virginia's Dulles International Airport. The following day, a US judge ordered that she remain behind bars while awaiting trial for charges related to helping her husband run his drug-trafficking business.
Her arrest came as a surprise.
It was surprising, because even though she had been implicated during her husband's trial, she wasn't arrested until two years later.
"She didn't expect to get arrested after her husband received life in prison, so this is obviously a troubling time," said her attorney Jeffrey Lichtman. "But we're going to get past it."
Why was she arrested?
On February 22, 2021, The US Department of Justice released a statement that in part reads:
"According to court documents, Aispuro is charged with participating in a conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana for importation into the U.S. Additionally, Coronel Aispuro is alleged to have conspired with others to assist Guzman in his July 11, 2015 escape from Altiplano prison, located in Almoloya de Juarez, Mexico."
Her lawyer said she took responsibility 'to get on with her life.'
She ended up pleading guilty to the charges, though. "Are you entering this plea because you are guilty and for no other reason?" asked US District Judge Rudolph Contreras with the help of an interpreter.
"Yes," Emma responded in Spanish.
"This is an arm's length plea agreement," her attorney said. "She's happy to take responsibility … [to] get on with her life." She was sentenced on November 30, 2021.
She'll serve three years in prison.
In November 2021, Emma was sentenced to three years in prison for helping her husband El Chapo run his drug cartel and escape from prison. She asked for mercy at her sentencing, saying, "Perhaps because of this [that she is the wife of a drug lord], there is reason for you to be harder on me, but I pray that you do not do that,” according to The New York Times.
Her sentence is considered light.
Her sentence was evidently so minimal due to the fact that she played just a small part in El Chapo's overall operation.
"The defendant was not an organizer, leader, boss or other type of manager," federal prosecutor Anthony J. Nardozzi said in court, according to The New York Times. "Rather she was a cog in a very large wheel of a criminal organization."
