WASHINGTON (AP) – The wife of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was arrested Monday at a Virginia airport on international drug trafficking charges, the Justice Department said, explaining in detail how she helped to trace her husband’s daring escape from a Mexican Prison.
Emma Coronel Aispuro, 31, who is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico, was arrested at Dulles International Airport and is expected to appear in Washington federal court on Tuesday.
She is charged with a single criminal charge of conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana in the United States. The Justice Department also accuses her of helping her husband escape from a Mexican prison in 2015 and of participating in the planning of a second prison. fled before Guzman was extradited to the U.S. in January 2017.
Colonel Aispuro remained in custody and it was not immediately known if he had a lawyer who could comment on the allegations.
As Mexico’s most powerful drug lord, Guzman escaped through an entrance under the shower of his cell into a thousand-kilometer (1.6-kilometer-long) illuminated tunnel with a motorcycle on rails. Escape planning was extensive, according to prosecutors, and his wife played a key role.
Judicial papers accuse Colonel Aispuro of working with Guzman’s children and a witness, who is now collaborating with the U.S. government, to organize the construction of the underground tunnel that Guzman used to escape from the Altiplano prison in Mexico to prevent him from being extradited to the US The plot includes the purchase of land near the prison, firearms and an armored truck and the smuggling of a GPS watch so that they could “identify their exact whereabouts to build the tunnel with an accessible access point for him “, according to the court document. to say.
Guzman was sentenced to life in prison between 2019. His Sinaloa cartel was responsible for smuggling mountains of cocaine and other drugs into the United States during his 25-year reign, prosecutors reported in recent court newspapers. They also said his “army of assassins,” or “killer men,” had orders to kidnap, torture, and kill anyone who stood in his way.
Colonel Aispuro, a former teenage beauty queen, regularly attended Guzman’s trial, even when the witness did so in a harsh light. The two, separated by age for more than 30 years, have been together since at least 2007 and share twin daughters, who were born in 2011.
Her father, Ines Colonel Barreras, was arrested in 2013 with one of her children and several men in a warehouse with hundreds of pounds of marijuana on the Douglas, Arizona border. Months earlier, the U.S. Treasury had announced financial sanctions against Colonel Barreras for his alleged drug trafficking.
After Guzman was arrested again after her escape, Colonel Aispuro put pressure on the Mexican government to improve her husband’s prison conditions. And after he was convicted in 2019, he moved to throw a clothing line in his name.
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Associated Press writer Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed to this report.