Emma Coronel Auspiro, 31, a former beauty queen who has two children with Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, was arrested at the Dulles International Airport in Washington DC
Credit: Reuters
The wife of Mexican drug lord El Chapo has been told by a US judge that she could face life in prison and a $10 million (£7m) fine for helping her husband run his multibillion-dollar cartel and plotting his prison break.
Emma Coronel Auspiro, 31, a former beauty queen who has two children with Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, was arrested at the Dulles International Airport in Washington DC on Monday.
A judge in Washington DC ordered that Coronel, a dual US-Mexican national, remain in prison until her lawyers are able to present a bail package.
Prosecutor Anthony Nardozzi argued the US believes Coronel should remain jailed, claiming that she “worked closely with the command-and-control structure” of the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico.
Mr Nardozzi said Coronel had access to criminal associates, including other members of the cartel, and "financial means to generate a serious risk of flight."
Coronel is the wife of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and is accused of helping her husband run his multibillion-dollar cartel
Credit: AP
According to court documents, Coronel faces charges of participating in a conspiracy to distribute 5kg of cocaine, 500g of methamphetamine, 1kg of heroin and 1,000kg of marijuana for importation into the US.
Authorities said Coronel, who spoke to US Magistrate Judge Robin Meriweather on Tuesday through a Spanish interpreter, relayed messages to help Guzman — once Mexico’s most powerful drug lord, conduct drug trafficking from 2012 to early 2014 with the cartel, and continued delivering messages while visiting him in a Mexican prison following his February 2014 arrest.
They also said Coronel conspired in Guzman’s famous July 2015 escape from the Altiplano prison in Mexico through a mile-long tunnel dug from his cell, and began plotting another escape following his January 2016 capture by Mexican authorities.
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is made to face the press as he's escorted to a helicopter in handcuffs by soldiers and marines at a federal hangar in Mexico City
Credit: AP
The government’s case is helped by an informant, codenamed Cooperating Witness 1, who testified that they were given $100,000 by Coronel to help Guzman’s escape from prison when he was recaptured in 2016.
The informant claims Coronel met with them and asked for assistance with the plot. Court documents say: "Cooperating Witness 1 told me Coronel agreed to help facilitate Guzman to escape from Altiplano via an underground tunnel."
The witness also claims that Coronel oversaw a $2 million plan to bribe Mexico’s head of prisons to send Guzman from a prison in Ciudad Juarez back to Altiplano.
Guzman was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years in 2019, and is currently serving his sentence at the federal supermax prison in Colorado.
El Chapo has been accused of earning $14 billion during his career by smuggling up to 200 tons of drugs across the US border.
Coronel met Guzman when she was a young beauty queen, and married him in 2007 at age 18. The couple went on to have twin daughters.
She has remained fiercely loyal to her husband, appearing every day in court during his trial.
“I will follow to wherever he is,” she told the Los Angeles Times of her husband in a 2017 profile. “I am in love with him. He is the father of my children.”
Mike Vigil, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s former chief of international operations, claimed she said she could be willing to cooperate.
"She has a huge motivation, and that is her twins," Mr Vigil said.
Свежие комментарии