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Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s wife has opened up about the unlikely love story with the notorious Sinaloa Cartel co-founder that began on a Mexican dance floor — and ended with her behind bars in a US prison.
Emma Coronel was just 17 when she first crossed paths with the notorious Sinaloa Cartel co-founder at a dance in 2007, several months after she was crowned queen of a beauty pageant in Canelas, a city in Mexico’s northern state of Durango.
“We were dancing – he with a young woman and I with someone else – but he thought I smiled at him when, in reality, I was laughing with my friend,” Coronel, now 37, said during a nearly six-hour broadcast on Kick with influencers Víctor Ordoñez and Guillermo Peña on Monday.
“He was very respectful,” Coronel said. “At first, he asked if I wanted to dance – sort of asking permission to invite me – and later sent me flowers. He was a gentleman with me.”
Coronel married El Chapo, then 50, on her 18th birthday at her family’s home in the rural town of La Angostura.
“It was a very private affair, just with people very close to me,” she said.
Coronel, who gave birth to El Chapo’s twin daughters in 2011, said her husband loved long walks in the mountains, riding motorcycles and gambling — but was not addicted to it. The couple never went a month without contact, but traveling together was out of the question, she said.
“By the time I came into his life, he was already a different person. He wasn’t the same anymore,” Coronel said. “He could no longer travel or move about freely … I arrived when things had already become more complicated. He did get to do that when he was young, but well, I didn’t.”
Coronel said she has not seen El Chapo since July 17, 2019, when he was sentenced to life in prison. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has banned Coronel and the couple’s twin daughters from having any contact with the convicted drug lord.
“He used to speak to me as if I were a baby,” she said. “That’s what I miss the most, because no one has ever spoken to me like that again.”
Less than two years later, on Feb. 22, 2021, Coronel was pulled off a flight at Dulles International Airport by the FBI and charged with money laundering and drug trafficking. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison.
Coronel said that she spent her first year in an Alexandria, Va., jail in solitary confinement and was allowed to leave her cell for one hour a day.
“It’s the most intense thing that can happen to a person, you know, because of what it does to you,” she said. “It’s awful imagining what’s going on outside – how everyone is doing – without knowing what’s actually happening, and being unable to control anything.”
English (US)