Emma Coronel is a free woman as of this Wednesday. The wife of drug trafficker Joaquín El Chapo This September 13, Guzmán has served most of the sentence he received for the crimes of drug trafficking and money laundering. Coronel, 34, is the third wife of the bloodthirsty boss of the Sinaloa Cartel, who is serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison in the State of Colorado and where she only has one hour outside of his cell. Coronel, on the other hand, has left a minimum security prison in southern Los Angeles where she has been preparing for her return to society for weeks. She was in prison for two and a half years of the three to which she was sentenced. From today she will be on parole.
An official from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) has confirmed to Telemundo that Coronel has already left the prison facilities located in San Pedro, a coastal community south of Los Angeles. “For privacy and security reasons, the FBOP does not provide additional information about individuals who are no longer in its custody,” spokeswoman Randilee Giamusso told the television station. Coronel’s name, however, continues to appear in the institution’s prison search engine. A federal official has assured the EFE agency that they will update the file later.
Coronel arrived in Los Angeles last June after a journey that took her to several prisons in the United States since her arrest in February 2021 at Dulles Airport, outside Washington DC. After the arrest she was taken to a federal prison in Alexandria, in the State of Virginia, where she spent nine months until she was sentenced in the fall of that year.
The trial against the former model and Instagram influencer took place in June 2021 amid great media attention that Coronel handled with the grace of a small celebrity fallen from grace. “I am writing to you to express my true regret for any harm I may have caused and I ask all citizens of this country to forgive me,” the defendant, who has Mexican and American nationality, said in November 2021. Coronel pleaded guilty to the federal crimes she faced and she was sentenced to three years, despite the fact that the Prosecutor’s Office requested four.
After the sentence, some experts in the legal system considered that Coronel had received a very light sentence for someone who collaborated with a criminal organization like the Sinaloa Cartel. In addition to accusing her of associating with other people to traffic cocaine, methamphetamines, heroin and marijuana to the United States, federal prosecutors considered her an accomplice in El Chapo’s spectacular escape from the Altiplano prison in July 2015. Coronel helped with the purchase of the land where the exit hole of the long tunnel that the drug trafficker used to escape was found. Authorities believe that the capo’s wife worked as a courier and helped coordinate the team of hitmen who worked with Guzmán that day that embarrassed the Mexican State.
Coronel spent a year in the federal prison in Alexandria. Her lawyer complained about the harsh conditions of confinement, since her client spent 22 hours a day in her cell and was only allowed to leave her cell to a small room at dawn. The inmate was transferred after that period to a minimum security prison in Texas. Coronel was in the FMC Carswell facility, on the outskirts of Dallas, for 15 months, the longest period of the sentence he had to serve. This summer she was finally brought west to a hybrid prison model that put her on house arrest administered by federal authorities. The big question is whether a judge will let her meet El Chapo again in the Colorado prison.
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