Emma Colonel Aispuro went back to being brunette for her photo last week.
The glamorous beauty queen wife of Mexico’s most notorious drug dealer last appeared in public as a blonde, her hair cascading down a glamorous white lace wedding dress that she modeled for Mexican stylist Benito Santos on Instagram. In another photo, she shows a shiny purple dress that wraps around her hips.
But as she prepares to denounce high-ranking members of the Sinaloa cartel, including her own stepsons, Colonel Aispuro was forced to look more sober in faded prison greens, her plump lips without red lipstick.
“She is definitely cooperating,” a federal law enforcement source told The Post, adding that Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s wife is a likely candidate for witness protection.
“Emma wants to stay away from violence and has always wanted to live in the United States,” said the source. She was born in California and has dual American / Mexican citizenship.
Colonel Aispuro, 31, turned himself in to authorities in Washington earlier this week and could face more than 10 years in prison if convicted of drug trafficking. She is also accused of helping Guzman, 63, escape from a Mexican high-security prison in 2015, and of helping to plan another escape before being extradited to the U.S. in 2017, according to court documents.
The long-legged brunette, who likes flashy designer clothes, participated in her husband’s trial in Brooklyn federal court in 2019. At the time, the Post reported exclusively that she was under federal investigation for helping to manage the cartel that is now led, the source said, by stepchildren Ovidio Guzman Lopez, 30, Ivan Archivaldo Guzman, 37, Jesus Alfredo Guzman Salazar, 34, and Joaquin Guzman Lopez, whose age is unknown.
Along the way, the former journalism student and aspiring model has accumulated almost 600,000 followers on Instagram. She posts glamorous photos of herself in low-cut blouses and chandelier diamond earrings, and shares stories on Instagram about her luxurious vacation in Venice, shortly after Guzman was sentenced to life in a Colorado maximum-security federal prison in July 2019. There were videos of gondola rides and dinners overlooking the canals. A video showed two glasses of white wine at an open-air restaurant, but it was unclear whether she was on a date.
Previous photos uploaded to her social media sites during her husband’s trial showed the brunette in reduced bikinis on windswept beaches. Others displayed it in skinny jeans combined with high-heeled shoes and Prada bags, amid a fleet of high-quality sports cars. These photos and video stories were taken down.
After the trial, Colonel Aispuro also registered the “El Chapo Guzman” brand to sell a line of clothing, cell phone cases and hats, according to public records.
Although it is not clear whether the commercial venture has gone ahead, Colonel Aispuro has retained many of his fans. Shortly after news of his arrest on Monday, many of those social media followers left heart emojis alongside photos of Colonel Aispuro in a tight black leather jacket, a golden crown on his head and highlighted red lips.
His followers expressed shock that “la Reinita” – the little queen – who also made a special appearance on VH1’s “Cartel Crew” two years ago, was arrested. “Is it true that Emma is in prison?” asked one of his followers on Instagram. “Free the queen,” wrote another.
Colonel Aispuro, the mother of the twins Emali Guadalupe and Maria Joaquina, 9, is being represented by a team of lawyers led by Manhattan lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman, who also defended her husband.
“She already had her defense attorney lined up before getting on a plane to deliver,” the source told the Post. “Your number one priority is to protect your children and stay in the United States.”
She has long denied any knowledge of her husband’s drug business. But an FBI agent who interrogated more than 100 members of the Sinaloa cartel said in court documents that “Colonel was aware of shipments of several tons of cocaine, production of heroin of several kilograms, shipments of marijuana of several tons and shipments of methamphetamine in tons ”. After visits to her husband in Mexican prisons, she transmitted messages to her trusted representatives, court documents say.
During Guzman’s trial in Brooklyn, Damaso Lopez Nunez, the trafficker’s longtime lieutenant, testified that El Chapo contacted him shortly after his capture by Mexican Marines in February 2014. Lopez said his boss asked him to “get meet the mother of the twins “, referring to Colonel.
Colonel Aispuro was born in July 1989 near San Francisco, but grew up in a remote area in northwestern Mexico surrounded by pine forests. Her father, Ines Coronel Barrera, was a cattle rancher in the region and a feared drug dealer who worked for Guzman. The daughter met Guzmán as a teenager, a beauty contest contender during the Coffee and Goiaba Festival in the village of Canelas in 2007.
Guzmán, then 50, fell in love with her at the time, although the marriage was widely seen as a way of solidifying Ines Coronel Barreras’ position within the Guzmán cartel in Sinaloa. Barreras was convicted of gun possession and marijuana trafficking in 2017 and is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Mexico.
Since Guzman’s extradition to the USA, the Sinaloa cartel has been dominated by the eldest of his 15 children, known as “Los Chapitos”. In 2019, his territorial war with the rival drug trafficking gang, Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion, became particularly brutal, resulting in more than 2,000 deaths. In October of that year, when Mexican authorities captured Ovidio Guzman Lopez – known as El Raton or “the rat” – the threat of violence was considered so high that they let him go.
Lichtman declined to comment when contacted by The Post.