Global Courant
Emma Coronel Aispuro, wife of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, was transferred to a halfway house in Long Beach as part of her prison sentence for helping her husband run his multibillion-dollar criminal empire.
The former teen beauty queen was born near San Francisco and married Guzmán when she was 18 and he was 50, according to a 2016 LA Times interview with Coronel. Being a US citizen, Coronel was able to give birth to their twin daughters in Los Angeles County in 2011, while Guzmán was in hiding as a fugitive.
Coronel was sentenced to three years in prison in November 2021 after pleading guilty to a charge of money laundering conspiracy and knowingly conspiring to distribute drugs. Coronel, 33, was transferred from a federal prison in Forth Worth to a detention center in Long Beach on May 30, a Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesman said in a statement.
Prosecutors also allege that Coronel helped plan her husband’s 2015 escape from prison by smuggling a GPS watch disguised as food that helped him dig a tunnel under a Mexican prison.
During her sentencing in a Washington federal court, Coronel said she was “truly sorry for all the damage” she had caused, her words translated by a Spanish court interpreter. “I’m here for you asking for forgiveness,” she said.
Guzmán led the Sinaloa Cartel for several years and is responsible for importing and distributing more than a million pounds of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin into the United States, according to federal prosecutors who charged him in 2019 after his arrest in northern Venezuela. Sinaloa and extradition to the United States. Cartel violence spread across Mexico as Guzmán and his accomplices ordered hitmen to kidnap, interrogate, torture and butcher members of rival drug organizations.
Guzmán is serving a life sentence plus 30 years at ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Colorado.
