Emma Coronel Aispuro, the wife of imprisoned Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, is scheduled to be released from prison on September 13, 2023. The 34-year-old former beauty queen was convicted in 2021 on drug trafficking charges.
She was sentenced to three years in prison, but her sentence was later reduced. She was moved from a federal prison in Texas to a halfway house in Long Beach, California in June. Inmates who have good behavior in federal prison are often moved to a halfway house up to six months before their release.
Coronel Aispuro married Guzman in 2007 when she was 18. They have twin daughters. During her sentencing, she asked the judge for a punishment that would allow her to watch her then 9-year-old twins grow up. She was also given two years of supervised release.
Coronel Aispuro pleaded guilty in 2021 to willfully conspiring to distribute heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine. Coronel Aispuro also pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy charge and to engaging in transactions with a foreign narcotics trafficker.
Prosecutors had asked for a four-year sentence, but U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras imposed a three-year term, saying Coronel Aispuro’s role was a small piece of a much larger organization.
Her attorneys at the time pointed out that Coronel Aispuro was 17 when she met Guzman and married him on her 18th birthday.
“This began when she was a very impressionable minor married to a powerful man more than three decades older,” Jeffrey Lichtman, her attorney, said at the time.
“El Chapo” is serving a life sentence in the U.S. He was convicted in Feb. 2019 on murder conspiracy and drug charges. The drug kingpin was also ordered to forfeit $12.6 billion in profits he made off his drug business. He is serving his time in the notorious United States Penitentiary Florence, a supermax federal prison in Colorado.
“El Chapo” and Coronel Aispuro have twin daughters together. During Coronel Aispuro’s sentencing, she asked the judge for a punishment that would allow her to watch her then 9-year-old twins grow up.
The drug lord last month wrote to the federal judge who oversaw his case, asking for Coronel Aispuro and their young daughters to visit him at the supermax prison, according to a handwritten letter obtained by CBS News. Coronel Aispuro still faces years of supervised release.
