The wife of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was arrested Monday in the United States. She is accused of helping her husband run his multimillion-dollar cartel and plots his daring escape from a Mexican prison in 2015.
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Emma Coronel Aispuro, a 31-year-old former beauty queen, was arrested at Dulles International Airport in Virginia and is expected to appear in Washington federal court on Tuesday. She is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico.
His arrest is the latest twist in the bloody multinational saga involving Guzman, the longtime head of the Sinaloa drug cartel. Guzman, the two dramatic escapes from his prison in Mexico fueled by a legend that he and his family were virtually untouchable, was extradited to the United States in 2017 and faces a lifetime in prison.
Now his wife, with whom he has two young daughters, has been accused of helping him run his criminal empire. In a one-off criminal complaint, Colonel was charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana in the United States. escaped from prison before Guzman was extradited to the US
Colonel’s attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, declined to comment Monday night.
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As Mexico’s most powerful drug lord, Guzman led a cartel responsible for smuggling mountains of cocaine and other drugs into the United States during his 25-year reign, prosecutors reported in recent court papers. They also said his “army of assassins,” or “killer men,” had orders to kidnap, torture, and kill anyone who stood in his way.
His vacation in prison became a matter of legend and raised serious questions about whether Mexico’s judicial system was capable of holding him accountable. In one case, he escaped through an entrance under the cell shower to an illuminated tunnel a thousand miles away with a motorcycle on rails. Escape planning was extensive, according to prosecutors, and his wife played a key role.
Judicial papers accuse Colonel 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 escaped from the Altiplano prison to prevent his extradition to the United States. a piece of land near the prison, firearms and an armored truck and clandestinely introduced a GPS clock so they could “identify exactly their whereabouts to build the tunnel with an entry point accessible to it,” they say court papers.
Guzman was sentenced to life in prison in 2019.
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Colonel, who was a beauty queen in her teens, regularly attended Guzman’s trial, even when the witness implicated her on her prison vacation. The two, separated by age for more than 30 years, have been together since at least 2007 and their twin daughters 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 his father for his alleged drug trafficking.
After Guzman was arrested again after her escape, Colonel pressured 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.
Mike Vigil, former head of international operations at the Drug Control Administration, said Colonel “has been involved in drug trafficking since childhood. He knows the internal workings of the Sinaloa cartel.”
She said she might be willing to cooperate.
“He has a huge motivation, and that’s his twins,” Vigil said.