The Guardian
El Chapo’s wife helped him run a drug empire from prison, US court listens
Emma Coronel ‘is not a big fish’, experts say, but the prosecution accuses her of helping with the 2015 dramatic escape from prison Emma Coronel Aispuro, wife of Mexican drug cartel chief Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, appears during a virtual hearing in federal court in Washington DC on Tuesday. Photo: Jane Rosenberg / Reuters The wife of the world’s most famous drug cartel chief, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, appeared in court on charges of helping him manage his prison drug empire, the day after he was arrested in Washington International Airport. Emma Coronel Aispuro, a 31-year-old Mexican-American woman who married the drug lord in 2007 after he saw her at a beauty pageant, is also accused of helping to organize her husband’s breathtaking in 2015, which it involved a kilometer-long tunnel of the prison shower and a motorcycle adapted to run on tracks from end to end. After a hearing in the Washington DC district court, in which Colonel appeared on video, she was detained without bail while awaiting trial. Prosecutors argued that she represented a risk of escape with access to funds and claimed that “the defendant worked closely with the command and control structure of the drug trafficking organization known as the Sinaloa cartel – mainly with her husband”. Apparently, Colonel believed himself safe enough from the prosecution to risk a trip to the United States. At her husband’s 2018 trial in New York, she was a daily presence in court, chewing gum behind big sunglasses. The trial resulted in a life sentence plus 30 years in prison and a loss order of more than $ 12 billion. But Colonel said he knew nothing about the Sinaloa cartel, run jointly by her husband, arguing that the couple had a modest irrigation firm and that El Chapo was just a “humble man” that the media had made “too famous”. “Emma Coronel is very naive to the American justice system,” said Mike Vigil, the former head of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, who pointed out that allegations about his role in escaping from prison in 2015 came up at the Guzmán trial. “She must have felt very safe and protected that nothing would happen to her.” She was confident enough of her untouchability to give a television interview in November 2019 drinking sparkling wine on the back of a yacht in Miami for a reality show called the Cartel Crew, which consists mostly of relatives of convicted drug dealers complaining about feeling sick. judged. “Sometimes, you just want to do what you see other people do. We want to be normal, ”said Colonel, and asked for advice on how to set up a clothing line on behalf of her husband. Those options seemed less viable on Tuesday, after Colonel’s arrest at Washington’s Dulles airport and his initial appearance in court to face charges of “conspiring to consciously and intentionally distribute” shipments of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine. Emma Colonel Aispuro. Photo: AFP / Getty Images She was 17 when Guzmán showed up with his entourage to see her win a parade at the coffee and guava festival in her family’s village, Canelas. She was born in Santa Clara, California, when her mother visited relatives there, but grew up in rural Mexico. The statement by FBI special agent Eric McGuire to the Washington DC district court indicates that she would know who she was marrying, as her father, Inés Coronel Barreras, was a mid-level member of the Sinaloa cartel, designated by the USA as a “Important foreign drug dealer” and that his brothers were also in the family business. “Colonel knows and understands that the Sinaloa cartel is the most prolific cartel in Mexico,” said McGuire. “Colonel was aware of shipments of several tons of cocaine, production of several kilograms of heroin, shipments of marijuana of several tons and shipments of tons of meth. The statement also cited Guzmán’s handwritten letters giving instructions to his cartel subordinates, which McGuire said he obtained from an informant and which were delivered by Colonel, with whom Guzmán has nine-year-old twins. “The mother of the twins is going to tell you and my children something. Stay alert, compadre. She will explain, ”said one of the letters. “The mother of the twins will bring a message to all of you, for everyone to see in person.” McGuire claimed that while Guzmán was in Altiplano prison in Mexico, Colonel transmitted instructions to his children (from previous marriages) on how to organize his escape. They bought land a kilometer from the prison in 2014, started building a house, but then dug a tunnel towards the prison. Colonel and his brothers-in-law also discussed the smuggling of a GPS watch to Guzmán so that they could guide the tunnel to his cell, according to the arrest warrant. Emma Coronel Aispuro was a family presence at the trial of her husband, Joaquín Guzmán, the Mexican drug dealer known as ‘El Chapo’ in Brooklyn in 2019. Photo: Kena Betancur / AFP / Getty Images In July 2015, he slipped through a hole dug into the floor of your shower and out of the tunnel that was equipped with lighting, ventilation and the motorcycle on tracks that were believed to have been used to transport equipment and excavated earth. Falko Ernst, Mexico’s senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, suggested that there was a geopolitical element behind Colonel’s arrest. “She is not a big fish. She is a narco-celebrity. But in terms of her roles within the Sinaloa scene, she is not a great player, ”said Ernst. “So this act of detaining and keeping her in the United States is more of a symbolic act. This perpetuates the message that the United States will still be a factor in what we call the ‘war on drugs’ here in Mexico ”. Colonel’s TV appearances and attempts to monetize her husband’s image and build a profile as an influencer were more than vanity, according to a watchful observer from the Sinaloa cartel in the city of Culiacán, who said: “She had to to work”. Federal prosecutors argued in a New York court that, over a quarter of a century, El Chapo has accumulated a fortune of at least $ 12,666,181,704, but despite this extremely accurate figure, efforts to seize the assets of the jailed boss have struggled to progress. “Not all that wealth exists,” said the observer. “El Chapo had money, of course, but not as everyone thought.” On Tuesday, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador briefly described the arrest “an issue that the United States will decide”. The president, commonly called Amlo, asked American prosecutors to provide details about the case. Amlo also suggested that the Colonel case could be linked to a case against former Mexican public security secretary Genaro García Luna, who was arrested in Dallas in 2019 on drug trafficking charges and is awaiting trial in the United States. Amlo took on a generally courteous tone with the Guzmán family and refused to speak ill of El Chapo. The president greeted El Chapo’s elderly mother, María Consuelo Loera, in March last year and acknowledged that she had applied for help to obtain a US visa to visit her son in a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.