US authorities detained the wife of imprisoned Mexican drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman on cocaine smuggling charges at an airport outside Washington on Monday, the Justice Department said.
The department said that Emma Coronel Aispuro, 31, faces one allegation of conspiracy to bring cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana into the United States for importation.
At Dulles International Airport, she was arrested.
The chief of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the most infamous drug trafficking gangs in Mexico, was Guzman.
According to court filings, he ran an organization that brought hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States and was behind several murders of those who crossed him.
He was extradited to the United States to stand trial in 2017, and two years later, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
According to the Department of Justice, Coronel took part in cartel operations and even reportedly helped Guzman escape from Mexican prison in two plots, including the successful first one in 2015.
It was not previously understood that it was planned by US authorities to arrest her.
Coronel, a former U.S.-Mexico resident and Guzman’s mother of twins, appeared in court almost every day of his three-month trial in New York.
During more than two years of pre-trial detention, she was barred from any contact with him.
But every day, as he entered and left the courtroom during the proceedings, Guzman touched his heart and blew a kiss at her.
There were rumors during the trial that she was involved in the escape from his company and jail, but officials let her come and go freely.
“I can only say that I have nothing to be ashamed of. I am not perfect, but I consider myself a good human being who has never hurt anyone intentionally,” she said at the end of the trial.
Guzman was locked up in the highest-security prison in the United States, the ADX federal prison in Florence, Colorado.
Months later, Coronel appeared on the VH1 reality series “Cartel Crew,” about the lives of people seeking to break away from families involved in the drug trade. In an episode filmed aboard a luxurious yacht near Miami, Coronel tells Michael Blanco, the son of Colombian cocaine queen Griselda Blanco, that she wants to have a normal life and is thinking about launching a clothing line in the name of her husband.
“Sometimes you just want to do what other people do,” she says while sipping champagne.
Coronel is expected to appear by video conference in federal district court in Washington on Tuesday.
Her US lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, told AFP she would be pleading “not guilty.”
