John Tenth
02/25/2021 14:02
Clarín.com
World
Updated 02/25/2021 2:02 PM
For those who followed the 2019 trial of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the news earlier this week that his wife
Emma Coronel Aispuro had been arrested
in the United States on charges of drug trafficking should not have been a surprise.
During that process, the 31-year-old woman had already been accused of having
played a central role in
her husband's
escape
from a Mexican prison in 2015. In the process, messages were also shown between the two in which Guzmán asked her to
hide weapons in the face of a break-in.
According to the newspaper Reforma, an alleged letter from "El Chapo" in which he alerts his lieutenants that "the mother of the twins" will be in charge of bringing him instructions is a key piece on which the US government relied to arrest her.
Coronel and Guzmán have
nine-year-old twin daughters
: Emali Guadalupe and María Joaquina.
Arrest photograph of Emma Coronel provided by the Alexandria Sheriff's Office.
Photo: EFE
At first glance, the arc of Coronel's life seems to revolve around that common place that has been
built around the "women of the drug trade"
: young people initially seduced by the power of their husbands who mutate accomplices involved in all the aspects of the operation.
A furious transition that alternates in the popular imagination between the image of an innocent damsel and a criminal carrying bags of cocaine along a tunnel below the border.
From Quinceañera to Scarface nonstop
.
Of course, reality bucks and moves in unpredictable ways.
To begin with, it must be said that Coronel was born into a family accused of having ties to the Sinaloa Cartel.
That he grew up in the Golden Triangle, the epicenter of drug trafficking in Mexico.
That she met Guzmán at 17 and
married him when she was 18
.
She lived almost in seclusion until the capture and trial of "El Chapo" catapulted her to a rare world fame, traversed by
her passage through a
reality show
and an Instagram account where she sought to establish herself as an influencer.
A photo of Emma Coronel from her adolescence, around the time when it is estimated that she met Joaquín "El Chapo Guzmán. Photo: Clarín Archive
A mosaic of multiple pieces that paradoxically began in the same place where Coronel is now detained: the United States of America.
A family with a background
Emma Coronel Aispuro was born on July 2, 1989 in Santa Clara, California, United States.
As he has said, it was a coincidence that he was born there.
His mother had migrated north and ended up there.
Before long,
the family had already returned to Mexico
.
They settled in Durango, very close to the State of Sinaloa, where "El Chapo" Guzmán would build his empire.
Coronel has said that when he was 11 years old, he returned to the United States with his mother's relatives.
He studied there for a year, but
at 12 he returned to Mexico.
“They sent me to learn English, to see what it was like where I was born, more than anything.
Yes I liked it, but I wanted to go back because I missed them a lot;
I didn't get used to it ”, he declared in an interview with Proceso.
Emma Coronel after the trial of her husband, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, in 2019. Photo: AFP
Few details of Coronel's childhood are known.
In an interview with
The New York Times
in 2019, he only said that he grew up in a
"loving and united family"
, along with a brother and sister he "loved" them.
In another note that he gave to the weekly Proceso, he affirmed that his life in northern Mexico was spent in the middle of a bucolic scene of rural life, far from "those things that you see in the city and are so stressful."
To the FBI, however, the Colonel Aispuro were
far from being an ordinary family
.
According to reports in the Mexican press, Coronel spent a large part of her life
surrounded by drug traffickers
.
His father, Ines Coronel Barreras, was syndicated by the United States as a
middle command of the Sinaloa Cartel.
A portrait of Emma Coronel sitting inside the New York court where Guzmán was being tried, very close to her husband.
Photo: REUTER
In 2013, he was arrested in Agua Prieta, a Mexican town on the border with Arizona, United States.
In that operation, the security forces seized
32 packages of marijuana and five weapons.
Because of this, he was
sentenced to 10 years in prison
.
On that occasion, the son of Coronel Barreras and Emma's brother, Inés Omar Coronel Aispuro, were also arrested, but received a lesser sentence.
However, the family member most connected to drug trafficking was Ignacio Coronel, Emma's uncle.
Known as “El Nacho Coronel”, he was
killed in a confrontation
with the military in 2010.
Considered the maximum figure of the cartel in Guadalajara, "El Nacho" became the third most important person in the entire criminal structure, just below "El Chapo" and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, the man accused of being the current leader of the cartel.
Coronel, for his part,
has always denied
that "El Nacho Coronel" was a relative of his.
An image of Emma Coronel from around 2014. Until the time of Guzmán's trial in 2019, only a few photos of her were known.
Photo: Archive
“Emma Coronel grew up with an intimate knowledge of the entire workings of the drug trafficking industry, and she married Guzmán as a teenager.
She
understands the scope of the Sinaloa Cartel operation,
”wrote FBI agent Eric S. McGuire in an affidavit released as the basis for obtaining the recent arrest warrant for the woman.
In McGuire's writing the episode that would mark a turning point in the life of Coronel is mentioned.
Because although during her childhood she could only be accused of belonging to a criminal family that she had not chosen,
her marriage to "El Chapo" introduced her to
the world of drug trafficking.
According to numerous Mexican media, the relationship between Coronel and Guzmán was born after the two met at a party in Durango.
Then would come the brief courtship, the wedding, and a lifetime of fights for the groom,
increasingly surrounded by the government of Mexico and the DEA
.
Courtship, escapes and twins
The chronicle of the link between Emma Coronel and Joaquín Guzmán indicates that everything would have started at the end of 2006. Coronel was only 17 years old and “El Chapo” was 49 when they met at a party in a ranch in Durango.
It would take a few months for the relationship to
become public in a beauty pageant
that is considered the foundation stone of history.
An Emma Coronel image from her days participating in beauty pageants.
Photo: Clarín Archive.
The occasion was the election of the queen of the "Festival del Café y La Guayaba", an event organized by the municipality of Canelas, a town in Durango.
Emma Coronel applied for the competition along with four other young women.
As part of the event, each young person had to organize different activities to achieve adhesions.
Coronel chose January 6, 2007 to carry out his “festivity”, an
episode that has become almost a local myth
.
The Mexican media Proceso published what is perhaps the most detailed chronicle of what happened that day.
Around 11 in the morning, about 200 motorcycles entered the town.
On board were men in
black ski masks armed with machine guns.
They were gradually staked around 10 town entrances in preparation for what was to come.
Around 4.30 pm, six planes arrived at the local airport.
Joaquín Guzmán Loera descended from one of them.
He was in jeans, a T-shirt and black sneakers.
On his chest he
carried an AK-47 assault rifle
.
A capture of an Instagram story that Emma Coronel, the wife of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, dedicated to her husband (Capture of the IG therealemmacoronel).
Security personnel dressed in green uniforms and heavily armed got off the other planes.
For the journalist, the scale of the deployment
exceeded "that of a presidential entourage
.
"
The men lowered contingents of more weapons and crates of whiskey from the ships.
In the central plaza, the musical group Los Canelos, who had also arrived in one of the planes, began a recital in which Coronel, who effectively won the title of queen of the festival,
danced for the first time with Guzmán
.
In his account of the history of the bond, Coronel states that they started out as friends and eventually became a couple.
Within this scenario, the display at the festival would have been a key instance of the courtship.
In an interview with Telemundo, she stated that what conquered her was the way in which Guzmán treated her.
“He
didn't bring me big gifts or anything.
He wins people over by his way of being ”, he explained.
The couple married in 2007, shortly after
she turned 18.
Guzmán was already 50.
The wedding itself has become another element crossed by multiple, and sometimes contradictory.
Coronel has said it
was a small event
, attended only by family members and close friends.
Some reports have indicated, however, that there were very important guests, and a high-scale security operation.
Among the supposed high profiles, politicians and members of the Sinaloa cartel are targeted, including Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. There are even versions that
say that the wedding never took place
.
An image of Emma Coronel from 2018 leaving the court where Guzmán's trial was taking place.
Photo: AP
This is based on statements that Zambada made in an interview, and the fact that Guzmán himself stated on one occasion that he was still married to his first wife, but that he "lived" with Coronel.
Despite having married a man who was once estimated by Forbes magazine to have a
fortune of around $ 13 billion
, Coronel says her life did not take a significant leap after the wedding.
They didn't go anywhere on their honeymoon, and soon he was studying.
He finished high school and then studied Communication.
Guzmán had become the
most wanted drug dealer in the world
, and his life had turned into a constant flight.
They could go months without seeing each other, until suddenly it appeared out of nowhere.
As was clear in the trial, the bond between them was marked from the beginning by his infidelities.
The actress Kate del Castillo was
even
rumored to be his lover
, a fact that was flatly denied by the woman on more than one occasion.
Despite this regimen, in 2010 Coronel became pregnant.
Taking advantage of her dual citizenship, she traveled to the United States and in 2011 gave birth in Arizona.
Everything indicates that
from that moment he led a low-profile life
until Guzmán was arrested in 2016 and extradited to the United States to be prosecuted.
It was throughout that process in a Manhattan court that Emma Coronel would become a
world-renowned figure
.
"I'm a normal woman"
The Joaquín Guzmán trial that took place in New York between November 2018 and February 2019 generated an enormous repercussion.
Seeing the most emblematic drug trafficker of the last 25 years in front of a court even earned the qualification of being
one of the "trials of the century."
Sitting in one of the front rows, Emma Coronel quickly became one of the focal points of attention.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Emma Coronel Aispuro (@therealemmacoronel)
Every morning, Coronel arrived to witness the accusations and the witnesses presented by the prosecution.
She heard testimonies that incriminated her in criminal activities and
even a lover of her husband
.
She even lent herself to interviews where she defended her husband and spoke of the love her daughters had for their father.
"I don't know my husband as the person who is trying to show those who testify against him," Coronel told
The New York Times
.
"Rather, I
admire him for being the person I met and married
."
One issue that she never wanted to talk about, however, was the
evidence that was presented against her
throughout that trial.
Coronel's profile did not drop even after Guzmán was sentenced to life in prison in July 2019. In fact, he appeared to rise even higher.
She created an Instagram account, which was authenticated as official, where she showed images of her and her daughters in different parts of the world.
As of today,
only five images remain on the account.
His media exposure even featured a stint on a reality show in November 2019. Called the Cartel Crew (Members of the Cartel), the program that aired on VH1 focused on the lives of various characters linked to organized crime.
Wife Chapo Guzmán
Chapo novel
"We are normal,
I consider myself a normal woman,
and it happens to me a lot that people judge me without knowing me," said Coronel.
Although his presentation generated rejection and there were requests for the show to be canceled, it finally aired.
For the Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández, who wrote a book about the Sinaloa Cartel, the media profile that Coronel adopted was a way of taking revenge on her husband for everything he did to him: in public he appeared supporting Guzmán and blowing him a kiss, but
in private the situation was different
.
"Actually what they tell me is that I was very, very angry and very hurt," Hernández told
The Associated Press
.
"And so, when the trial concluded, what she decided is to take revenge and the way to take revenge is to make her husband see what he was missing," she added.
The high exposure of Coronel, a facet little cultivated among the partners of the drug traffickers of the cartel, generated
fear among his relatives and other members of the cartel.
"The mother was worried that they could
harm Emma, some enemy cartel,
as she was very loose and in a very unbridled social life," Hernández explained, based on information provided by a source.
"The mother was afraid that something like this could happen to her, or that she could be a target of the government itself."
For some outlets, the US authorities became aware of the change in Coronel's lifestyle and saw an opportunity to pressure her at a time when she might be
more willing to turn her back on her husband
.
For these hours, Coronel awaits his fate in a Virginia prison after a judge denied him bail and ordered that he remain in detention.
If found guilty, she could be sentenced to life in prison.
At this point, it is impossible to know what he could say, although it is speculated that he would seek to provide evidence to capture and convict some emblematic members of the Sinaloa Cartel, among them “El Mayo” Zamboada and the sons of “El Chapo”.
Judging from the statements of some FBI agents, there is optimism that Coronel will cooperate, driven by the ultimate incentive:
to see his daughters again
.
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