Married to the Mob: Emma Coronel’s Beginning, Middle and End
A marriage like no other? Recent doubts around the officialness of Coronel and El Chapo’s marriage seem irrelevant, but offer a moment to mull what being wed to his mobness might have looked like.
MEXICO CITY - The man who taught Emma Coronel - Joaquín ‘el Chapo’ Guzmán’s third wife - how to shoot a gun knew that he might be helping her save her own life.
She approached our man - let’s call him Ramón - not long after her husband was extradited to face trial in the United States in January 2017. He told me that she told him that with Chapo out of the country, she felt vulnerable to the other factions leading the cartel as well as rivals of Chapo’s who might want to settle a score now that he was helpless to retaliate.
Amidst that fear and uncertainty, she knew one thing for sure: After extradition, Chapo was never coming home.
Figuratively speaking. Because the couple didn't have the kind of “home” that the uninitiated might visualize when they think of a married couple.
Chapo and Coronel’s story has a very clear beginning, middle and end, and none of it took place in a shared narco mansion furnished with distasteful marble animal sculptures and the other nasty touches narco culture is famous for.
At least, if their union owned a narco mansion, Chapo didn’t live there. He may never even have set foot in it.
That’s because by the time the couple met and married, when she was just 18-years-old, Chapo was already on the lam. After being arrested in Guatemala in 1993, extradited and imprisoned in Mexico, he made his first prison escape in 2001, hidden in a laundry basket, according to urban legend. Other reports say he just walked straight out the front door.
It was some six years after his first great escape that he and Coronel had their first dance. It unfolded during a village party in the rural hamlet of Canelas, buried in the Golden Triangle region where Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua meet in Mexico’s north that is famous for the cultivation of poppy and marijuana. It’s the kind of place where it is easy to get lost, especially when you know the territory. Perfect terrain for a local fugitive.
“He was dancing with another girl, and I was dancing with my boyfriend,” Coronel told Anabel Hernandez, a Mexican journalist, in an interview in 2016. “We came together in the middle of the dance floor. He smiled at me, and he was really flirty.”
Chapo wasn’t put off by the fact that his wife-to-be was dancing with someone else. “Up in those parts, even when one has a boyfriend, you have to dance with everyone who asks you,” Coronel continued. That poor guy was already in the rearview mirror, and a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil pact was born between Coronel and Chapo.
A certain level of acceptance and openness would remain in their marriage (aren’t many of us looking for that? 😆). But let’s just pause here to consider their union, which I was “doing the math” on this week. I realized that they were barely together, and that the most time they’ve spent in the same room over the last 15 years was likely the courtroom in New York where his trial unfolded and Coronel was a permanent fixture. They blew each other kisses.
I also saw how being married to an international drug lord - even if he is a humble farmer-done-good - is nothing like being married to anyone else.
First off though, I mean, marrying El Chapo is a massive decision to make when you’re a teenager. I was OK at bathing and cooking for myself by that point in my life. I could even handle the odd beer. But making choices that would determine my entire life - even now - terrify and intimidate me. Coronel knew exactly who Chapo was and how he made his piles of money.
She had been steeped in the narco world her whole life.
Her father - Inés Coronel Barreras - was a drug trafficker. A detail I love? He was ten years younger than Guzmán when he became the drug capo’s new father-in-law. And when Chapo married Coronel, the boss already had a bunch of children who were closer to her age than his.
So Emma already knew the narco life, and she wanted in on the Chapo chapter. Which makes her either dumb, or confident, smart and ambitious. Dumb and ambitious don’t really tend to prove a successful combination. And she did - in many ways - fulfill her ambitions.
But I don’t want to rush to the end just yet. That was their beginning. Chapo and Coronel had to be clandestine from the start - a pattern that characterized the middle of their story.
Given Chapo was on the run, the authorities kept a constant eye on Coronel in the hope that she might lead them to the boss. Well, obviously not that close an eye because they did manage to have sex at least once between their wedding night and the birth of their girl twins in 2011, if in fact those girls are Chapo’s daughters.
“I am not so sure that Emma really loved Chapo Guzmán,” Mike Vigil, a former chief of DEA international operations who worked in Mexico for 13 years, told me. “They knew each other for such a short period of time before they got married. With him on the lam she had access to all of his money and she was able to lead a very affluent life, if you will, and not have to deal with Chapo that much.”
Is that a win/win? Those are strong pros and strong cons to a certain life and lifestyle. Risk, whilst experienced in luxury is still, well, risk. Whether the fear of getting assassinated or abducted is any less acute if you’re sleeping on silk sheets in Gucci pajamas I will never know but would love to ask Coronel, amongst a million other things.
Unlike her husband, Coronel wasn’t on the run nor was she born in Sinaloa, but rather in San Francisco, California. As a dual citizen with no charges against her (until more recently) she could move freely between Mexico and the United States. Their twin girls were also born in the U.S, at a time when their father was still hiding out.
And as Coronel’s life went on, it’s unlikely that Chapo was sitting around, twiddling his thumbs, or gazing longingly into the distance in between doodling pictures of Coronel.
“He had a ton of mistresses,” according to Vigil.
“Many women [who marry narcos] - like the young women who marry some old hedge fund guy because they want the life he can provide - settle. They understand their lives won’t be normal ones. But either they don’t want to leave because they like their lives or they are afraid to leave because they know the Narco husband will come after them,” Bonnie Klapper, a criminal lawyer in the U.S who has represented a number of female drug-traffickers told me.
It’s unknown whether Coronel followed the same policy as her husband re fidelity, but she definitely understood the deal. The marriage was a partnership, with arguably more business than pleasure. The little evidence that there is of their emotional connection suggests that she took his womanizing not-very-seriously at all.
When Chapo’s lover Lucero Sanchez told a court in New York in January 2019 how she and Chapo were awakened whilst together one night by a police raid in Culiacan, Sinaloa in 2014 and had to run naked through sewer tunnels to escape, Coronel is reported to have cackled with laughter as Sanchez broke down in tears.
“Coronel’s glee was only exacerbated when Sanchez’s lapel mic remained on even after she was removed for a break — her sobs still being broadcast throughout the courtroom after she left,” wrote the New York Post’s Emily Saul and Ruth Brown.
But the reality was Chapo’s people might likely have come after her, knowing what she knows, had she gone feral, so she had to face the music and she knew that time was coming. It was around then that she was doing shooting practice in rural Sinaloa, but ultimately she decided she'd have a better chance of survival if she handed herself in than if she learned how to put up a good fight.
She was taken into custody in Virginia when she flew to the U.S in February 2021. Sources told Vice World News’s Keegan Hamilton that Coronel in fact handed herself in.
Today, Coronel is spending most of every day alone in a cell. That no doubt sucks big time, but it won’t be for long. She was sentenced to just three years, a comparatively light sentence for the charges to which she pleaded guilty, which included that she helped her husband run the Sinaloa Cartel, as well as oiled his final prison break.
“This continues to puzzle me. Many of us, current and former prosecutors, are asking why did the U.S. government even bother to charge her when they agreed to such a low sentence. It seems to be the case, though of course no one will corroborate this, that she surrendered and they had a deal in place ahead of time,” said Klapper.
Chapo is likely to die in prison. But Coronel will be out before you can say “another year of pandemic. ” I’m curious to see how she will learn to live again, because her baby daddy will always be with her. If she plans to rely on his wealth for the rest of her life, that will come with its conditions. She may not even have the choice to be financially independent.
Being perhaps the most famous narco wife in the world also comes with its disadvantages. Maybe appearing on VH1’s Cartel Crew TV show doesn't seem like the smartest move now?
“Simple things. Every time she wants to apply to a private school - who are you? Where is the father and what does he do? Thank you, but no we don’t want your kids. Who is going to ask her out on a date!,” said Klapper. As if dating in your thirties and forties with young kids wasn’t hard enough (believe me!)
There’s always witness protection, but let me remind you of what that looks like….As Ray Liotta’s character Henry Hill says, ”I have to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” I can’t see Coronel living like a pleb, can you?
A return to Mexico seems at best risky, but more likely suicidal after doing the kind of time she is currently. Those she used to cut herself a better deal and shorter sentence will be watching. So perhaps Coronel’s best option is to go back to the shooting range. Coming soon to a gun-friendly state near you!