The last time Emma Coronel Aispuro met with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera as a free man was during a family dinner, days before Christmas 2015, in Sinaloa.
As Coronel herself recounted in the documentary “Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel Speaks,” released a few weeks ago, that meeting turned out to be their final farewell. The drug lord’s arrest, carried out on January 8, 2016, during Operation Black Swan, marked the end of an era in organized crime and a blow to the Sinaloa Cartel.
Emma Coronel, born in California and raised on an isolated ranch in Durango, Mexico, grew up in a rural environment without running water or electricity. From childhood, she witnessed the local economy based on the illicit cultivation of marijuana and learned to distrust the government, according to her testimony. At 17, she met Guzmán Loera at a local party. At that time, he was almost 50 years old and already a fugitive from justice.
She maintains that she didn’t know that this man was “El Chapo”: “Whenever I say it, they say, ‘No, how could you not know? He was on TV.’ I didn’t have a TV!” Coronel recounted in the documentary.
Life with Guzmán soon became a clandestine routine. To visit the drug lord in the mountains, she had to leave her phones at home and use different vehicles and small planes. “I knew I was being tracked to find him or obtain information about him,” she stated. Sometimes weeks would go by without them seeing each other; other times, they managed to spend several days together in safe houses.
