Emma Coronel Aispuro, the wife of notorious Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, pleaded guilty to charges in the United States. During the plea of guilty, she admitted to have helped her husband run his multibillion-dollar criminal empire.
Ms. Coronel, 31, was garbed in a green jail uniform when she appeared in federal court in Washington and pleaded guilty to three federal offenses as part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors.
The charges include knowingly and willfully conspiring to distribute heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine for several years. She also pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy charge and to engaging in transactions with a foreign narcotics trafficker.
Ms. Coronel was arrested in February at Dulles International Airport in Virginia and has been in jail since then. Prosecutors alleged that Coronel Aispuro “worked closely with the command-and-control structure” of the Sinaloa cartel and conspired to distribute large quantities of drugs, knowing they would be smuggled into the U.S.
She aided and abetted her husband smuggle at least 450 kilograms of cocaine, 90 kilograms of heroin and nearly 90,000 kilograms of marijuana into the United States.
Ms. Coronel also admitted to ferrying messages from her husband to a league of conspirators who orchestrated a prison break of the Altiplano prison, near Toluca, Mexico, in 2015. It was a dramatic incident that involved a self-powered rail cart and a mile-long tunnel that was dug into the shower of his cell.
According to her plea agreement, she was designated as a ‘minimal participant’ in the crimes of her husband’s former cartel. Under the agreement, she faces 108 to 135 months in prison. Her lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, however, said she may serve less jail term.
“She is happy that she can start putting all of this behind her and is looking forward to getting back to her children,” Mr. Lichtman said. “We are expecting a sentence that will not destroy her life.”
Although there was significant and overwhelming evidence at her husband’s trial that implicated her in international drug deals, some involving her own father, Ms. Coronel more or less roamed free for the past two years as U.S law enforcement officers investigated her and ultimately negotiated her surrender.
