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As a teenager, Emma Coronel Aispuro was drawn into the perilous world of drugs, power, and violence through her relationship with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, one of the most infamous drug lords in history. This entanglement not only endangered her life but eventually led to her imprisonment as their tumultuous love story unfolded.
Coronel provided an intimate look into her life as the wife of one of the globe’s most notorious figures in the Oxygen special Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel Speaks. In the program, she reflected on their romance and the ultimate consequences they faced as law enforcement tightened its grip.
“To this day,” she remarked in the special airing on November 28, “I still wonder what would have happened if I had married someone else.”
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Emma Coronel Meet
Though Coronel was born in California, she spent her formative years on a ranch in Mexico’s Durango state.
“I lived at home with my parents and three siblings,” she recounted. “We had no access to drinking water or electricity, and certainly no television. We were completely isolated from the outside world.”
To support their families, many farmers in the region turned to growing marijuana.
“That’s the way people made a living,” she said. “I grew up seeing and believing that the government were the bad guys. It’s like either you starve to death or you do what you have to do to survive.”
Coronel first crossed paths with Guzmán—a man 32 years her senior—when she was just 17 years old. The pair met at a local party where Coronel was trying to earn votes for an upcoming beauty pageant.
“I heard there was an important person at the party I was going to and they told me that person wants to dance with you,” Coronel remembered. “A man arrived and he told me, ‘My name is Joaquín.’”
By then, Guzmán was already a fugitive after a 1993 shootout at the Guadalajara airport that killed Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo.
“I don’t know if I recognized his name,” Coronel admitted. “Whenever I say that, people always say ‘How could you not know? How could you not know if he’s on TV?’ I didn’t have a TV.”
What Was Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Emma Coronel’s Life Like Together?
Coronel went on to win the beauty pageant and months later, just after her 18th birthday, she and Guzmán were married at her family’s ranch.
“It was a symbolic marriage,” she said. “We didn’t have a civil union.”
Guzmán was still trying to evade authorities and often hid out in the mountains.
“I wasn’t going to live in the mountains on the run,” Coronel said of their early life together. “I was in my stable house in Culiacán. People didn’t know my face. I could go around like any girl.”
At the time, their relationship was mostly a long-distance union, maintained over texts, but Coronel also occasionally took secret planes into the mountains to visit her new husband. There, they’d watch movies together and she would make homemade enchiladas.
She noted, “For me, that was a normal life.”
For a while, Coronel said Guzmán “carried the relationship,” often telling her she was “the most beautiful woman in the world,” until she ultimately fell in love herself.
Emma Coronel Insists She Didn’t Talk to Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán About Work
As the violence in the area escalated, Coronel told producers she was isolated from the bloodshed.
“Thank god, until now, I have never been in a situation where I have seen someone lose their life,” she said. “I have never ever been in a situation like that.”
She claimed that Guzmán also kept much of his life running Mexico’s dangerous Sinaloa cartel away from her.
“He didn’t sit and talk to me about his work,” she insisted. “Nor did I ask him about it, nor did I watch him working.”
In 2011—with Guzmán still on the run—she gave birth to the couple’s twin daughters in California, according to the documentary. The news soon made international headlines, putting her safety and that of her daughters’ at risk like never before.
It forced her to question her decision to marry the notorious outlaw.
“If I hadn’t married him,” she noted, “my father and my siblings never would have gone to prison.”
According to Coronel, her husband’s notorious past may have been behind the government’s decision to arrest her father and brother for drug trafficking, sending each to prison for 10 years.
There were also reports in the media suggesting that Guzmán was a serial cheater—something she said he always denied.
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán is Arrested, Before Brazen Prison Escape
As the drug-related violence reached new heights in the area, the pressure to find Guzmán intensified among the law enforcement communities. Despite the constant threat of capture, Guzmán still arranged a secret rendezvous in 2014 with his wife and daughters at the Miramar Hotel in Mazatlán.
“We were all really surprised that he hung around, that he stayed in Mazatlán,” Retired DEA Special Agent Carl Pike said. “It was just amazing to us that someone who was so tactically smart would do something so tactically dumb. It kind of gave breathe to the theory that Emma was truly his weakness.”
Guzmán and Coronel were sound asleep when authorities broke down the door around 4 a.m. armed with rifles.
“I think that was the moment I felt the most fear because my daughters were in the next room,” she said. “I felt fear of death.”
Guzmán was taken into custody and sent to El Antiplano Prison, one of the highest-security prisons in Mexico.
Coronel moved nearby and often visited her husband behind bars.
“Those were some very hard, very tough months for me,” she said. “I took on a lot of responsibilities, that to be honest, kept me very stressed.”
Then in July of 2015, Guzmán made a brazen prison escape, disappearing into a hole made in the floor of his shower into a long ventilated underground tunnel where a motorbike was waiting.
Coronel declined in the documentary to talk about what role, if any, she played in the escape.
Guzmán was once again a free man, but it wouldn’t be for long. He was captured in January of 2016 and later extradited to the United States to face federal charges including narcotics trafficking, murder conspiracy, using a firearm in furtherance of his drug crimes and participating in a money laundering conspiracy, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
“I felt very sad because I knew it was one of his fears,” Coronel said of her husband’s extradition. “I knew…that one of his fears had come true.”
Emma Coronel Attends Trial of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán
Coronel was a constant presence at Guzmán’s 2019 trial. According to the Oxygen special, she wanted to give her usband “emotional support.” The pair were known to exchange longing glances at one another, on occasion even earning reprimands from the judge to keep their focus at the front of the courtroom.
During the trial, prosecutors laid out the evidence they had that Guzmán directed his hitmen to “kidnap, interrogate, torture and slaughter members of rival drug organizations, at times carrying out acts of violence himself,” according to the statement from the DOJ.
When questioned about her husband’s alleged activities, Coronel seemed to distance herself from the allegations.
“I have good memories of him, so I can’t say that Joaquín is bad,” she said. “I can’t talk about something I haven’t seen.”
He was convicted on 10 federal counts and sentenced to life plus 30 years in prison for the crimes.
Coronel said although she wasn’t surprised by the verdict, she found herself feeling “more of a sadness.”
She faced her own legal troubles in 2021 after federal prosecutors accused her of carrying out crimes—including helping orchestrate his prison escape— to help her husband. She pleaded guilty in June of 2021 to charges of money laundering, drug trafficking and a criminal violation of the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act and was sentenced to 36 months in prison, according to the DOJ.
“It was quite hard. Being separated from my daughters was the worst,” she said of her time in prison. “You have time to think, to cry, you don’t have anything to distract you. I was falling into depression.”
Where is Emma Coronel Today?
Coronel was released from prison on Sept. 13, 2023 and was ordered to pay $1.5 million in restitution. She was ordered to serve 4 years of probation.
She told Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel Speaks, that she continues to live “one day at a time” and is focused on new opportunities.
“Since I got out of prison, I’ve been working on different projects,” she said of how she supports her twin daughters. “My parents have also been helping me. It hasn’t been easy.”
She’s working on developing her own brand and has been doing modeling work, even walking on the runway during Milan Fashion Week.
“I opened and closed the runway,” she said. “I modeled a wedding dress and an evening gown. It was a very beautiful experience that I will never forget.”
While it’s still unclear whether Coronel will ever be free of the cartel, she insisted that she wanted to “move forward” with her life.
In the final moments of the documentary, Coronel seemed to show some contrition, offering an apology to those impacted by the cartel’s violence.
“I sympathize with all the people who lost a loved one, who have suffered,” she said. “Truly, truly, I am very sorry.”
