El Chapo’s wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, pleads guilty in drug case
The wife of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán pleaded guilty Thursday to helping her notorious drug lord hubby run his expansive Sinaloa Cartel.
Emma Coronel Aispuro, 31, copped to charges including conspiracy to distribute vast amounts of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana while working for the murderous cartel that her husband ran for years in Mexico.
The former beauty queen, who married El Chapo in 2007, also pleaded guilty to money laundering and engaging in transactions and dealings in properties of a designated significant foreign narcotics trafficker.
She faces life in prison.
Speaking through a Spanish interpreter, Coronel’s only words during the hour-long proceeding in Washington, DC, federal court were to say “yes” that she had committed the crimes. She also confirmed that she understood she wouldn’t get a more lenient sentence because of her guilty plea.
Prosecutor Anthony Nardozzi said if the case went to trial, the feds would prove through witness testimony and evidence that Aispuro aided and abetted the objectives of the cartel and helped traffic 450 kilos of coke, 90 kilos of heroin and 45 kilos of methamphetamine.
She also helped traffic tens of thousands of kilos of marijuana, according to a statement of facts written by prosecutors.
In addition, Coronel acted as a go-between for El Chapo and other leaders of the cartel while the kingpin was locked up in a Mexican prison — and helped finance and plan his escape from the slammer in 2015, prosecutors charged.
Coronel accepted “multiple bulk cash deliveries” to finance the escape plan — and organized the elaborate prison bust with four of El Chapo’s sons, prosecutors said.
She bribed prison guards at the lockup known as Altiplano, so the drug kingpin could receive gifts such as food that were not readily available to other inmates, prosecutors said in the statement of facts.
Coronel then arranged to sneak a wristwatch with GPS capability disguised as a piece of food to her husband, so his cohorts working to bust him out could know exactly where in the prison he was each day, they added.
They then built an elaborate tunnel underneath the ground that led directly to the cell El Chapo was being held in and successfully sprung him from the prison.
El Chapo was recaptured and ultimately extradited to the US, where he was sentenced to life in prison after his trial in Brooklyn federal court in 2019 and is currently serving his time at federal supermax lockup in Colorado.
Coronel was arrested in February at Dulles Airport near Washington, DC, and has been held without bail since her arrest.
Her attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, said Coronel’s “happy to put this behind her” and hopes the judge will view her a “minimal participant” in the organization at sentencing and give her a single-digit sentence.
