"There appears to be no shortage of willing participants," he said. Her arrest doesn't seem to have reduced the harm caused by the cartel, he said. District Judge Rudolph Contreras imposed a shorter term, saying her role was a small piece of a much larger organization. Prosecutors had asked for four years in prison, but U.S. The leader of the Sinaloa cartel was recaptured the following year. That helped those digging the tunnel pinpoint his location and reach him. "The guidelines were so low there was no need to cooperate," he said.The wife of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison after pleading guilty to helping her husband run his multi-billion dollar criminal empire.Įmma Coronel Aispuro also helped her husband plan a dramatic escape through a tunnel dug underneath a prison in Mexico in 2015 by smuggling a GPS watch to him disguised as a food item, prosecutors said during a hearing in federal court in Washington. Outside the courthouse Tuesday, Coronel's attorney Jeffrey Lichtman pushed back at reports that she had cooperated with government investigators probing the drug business, reports that he said had left her in danger of retribution.īecause she had no criminal record and readily admitted guilt, skipping a trial, Lichtman said, the Justice Department's sentencing guidelines stipulated a relatively short prison term. Months later she pleaded guilty to all three trafficking and laundering counts against her. Guzman was sentenced in July 2019 to life in prison.ĭespite her closeness to one of the world's most notorious drug traffickers, she was able to move in and out of the United States freely until she was arrested on arrival at Dulles International Airport outside Washington in February 2021. Tall, with long dark hair, tight-fitting clothes and lots of make-up, Coronel would smile at Guzman and blow him kisses as she attended the trial almost every day for three months, sometimes bringing their daughters so they could see their father. Thirty-two years her husband's junior, Coronel met him in her mid-teens and they married when she turned 18.Ĭoronel became the object of intense fascination when she regularly joined the audience at his trial in New York after he was extradited from Mexico in 2017. "I hope that you raise your twins in a different environment than you've experienced to date" he told her. Pronouncing her sentence, Judge Rudolph Contreras wished Coronel good luck. Nevertheless, Nardozzi said, "the defendant opted to take responsibility for her actions" immediately after her arrest. Rather she was a cog in a very large wheel of a criminal organization," he told the court.īut the prosecution also noted that Coronel had a key role in helping her husband escape from a Mexican prison in 2015. "The defendant was not a leader, organizer, boss or other type of manager. "The defendant's actual role was a minimal one," said prosecutor Anthony Nardozzi. Prosecutors and her defense lawyers alike described Coronel as not involved in the core business of Guzman's Sinaloa Cartel, which shipped hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs into the United States, according to the US Justice Department. The judge said she would also pay $1.5 million in a restitution deal agreed before the hearing, and that she would be given credit for nine months already spent behind bars since her arrest. "I beg you to please not allow them to grow up without the presence of their mother." "They are already growing up without the presence of one of their parents," she said. She asked the judge to make it possible that she be allowed to raise her twin nine-year-old daughters. "I am suffering as a result of the pain that I caused my family." "I express my true regrets for any and all harm that I may have done," she said in Spanish before the sentence was announced.
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