The highest-ranking woman in the Sinaloa Cartel Vs Emma Coronel.
Women's power today still seems to be defined by old metrics: What they look like and who they're sleeping with.
One of these images shows the highest-ranking women in the Sinaloa Cartel. The other is the wife of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the famous male drug lord.
You probably already know the name of the woman on the left: Emma Coronel, aged 34, who walked out of prison to freedom last week after less than three years behind bars. But she’s far from the highest-ranking woman in the Sinaloa Cartel. That medal goes to Guadalupe Fernandez Valencia, on the right, who is now 63.
Both of these women wield power, but power of very different kinds. But the type of power that society’s collective attention, and the media, tends to focus on speaks volumes about the way we view women, and organized crime.
Emma’s release from prison last week made headlines around the world, as did much of what she did, said, and wore, before she was finally arrested and sentenced in 2021. Guadalupe, on the other hand, first made some headlines when was arrested and pleaded guilty in a court in Chicago in June 2019. Then she blurred back into relative obscurity.
But there’s every chance that Guadalupe might have been speaking to Guzmán and his adult sons with the same frequency or more than Emma.
Guadalupe was described as the “lieutenant” to Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, known as Jesús or “Alfredillo,” one of Chapo's sons. They worked together on the entire drug distribution process, from start to finish. She was a fundamental part of the business, running logistics, money laundering and other key business activities for the Sinaloa Cartel. By the time she was captured in 2016, she had been in the drug business for more than three decades.
By the time Emma was born, in 1989, Guadalupe was nearly 30, and had fled her home state of Michoacán, Mexico. She took to dealing drugs on the streets of California to get by, and she was eventually captured and sentenced to a decade in prison.
When she got out and was deported back to Mexico was around the time that Emma said “I do” to El Chapo in rural Sinaloa.
Back home again, Guadalupe was soon back in the drug business, but this time she was playing pro. She likely got introduced to the Chapito boys by her brother Manuel, who she started helping traffic cocaine to the U.S. “She was importing an average of 30 kilos a week from early 2009 to mid 2010 to these customers [in L.A], and some 3500 lbs of marijuana,” according to U.S court documents.
“To protect their lucrative drug trade, cartel members, including Valencia, used any means necessary, including bribing corrupt public officials, committing kidnappings and extortion, and threatening or committing violence against rival drug dealers as well as members of law enforcement,” according to the charges on the indictment against Chapo and his crew, on which she is the only woman.
When Manuel got arrested in 2010, Guadalupe moved to Guadalajara and tried to go straight, prosecutors said. But then she got a visitor—most likely her former boss Jesús or one of his envoys— who told she wasn’t safe there. In mid 2012, she moved to Culiacán and started trafficking again.
It’s unclear, from her case documents, whether that move was a choice or an order, but that’s where she stayed until she was detained a month after el Chapo in 2016.
I’ve often wondered if she ever hung out with Emma during her time working for the Sinaloa Cartel. Maybe during a company meeting or two, or in the exchange of cash or cocaine. Maybe not. Emma and Chapo married when he was already a fugitive, so the time the couple would have spent together were likely snatched days and nights. Guadalupe was likely a more constant presence at the Guzmán family meetings than Emma.
Whilst Guadalupe was making moves in the shadows, Emma was enjoying the criminal catwalk. Her straight black hair, white skin and voluptuous figure spawned a look across her home state that thousands of women have sought to emulate, despite the dangers.
“I was in a hair salon once, and there was a young woman there getting hair extensions,” Sara Bruna Quiñónez Estrada, Sinaloa’s then Attorney General (and the first woman to ever hold the post), told me on a visit to her office one day in February 2022. “She turned to the stylist and said, ‘Give me the Emma look.’”
“And it made me wonder,” said Quiñónez Estrada, “how we have gotten to this point, that this woman is a prototype for others of all social classes.”
For many in Mexico, especially in the state of Sinaloa, Chapo’s is a rag to riches story to be admired and emulated. The macho culture admires the women who adorn the arms of drug-traffickers who themselves are by definition, male. Emma understood that, embraced it, and owned it to the max. She carved out a world for herself - physically and emotionally - in which she played the narco wife role. We saw her making all sorts of moves, such as TV interviews, media appearances, social media sensations and even launching a line of Chapo branded gear.
During her husband’s trial, she coldly mocked the mistresses of her husband who testified against him. 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 even 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.
Before his final capture, Emma helped curate her husband’s third and final epic prison escape in 2015. She no doubt used his criminal fortune to buy the land outside the prison as well as the cooperation of the necessary authorities. The cartel dug a sophisticated ventilated, well-lit tunnel under the land via which Chapo escaped on a motorbike. On rails.
Emma seems to court the limelight as much as Guadalupe shunned it. Emma is low-hanging fruit for the public, which seems to measure her worth using the metrics by which women have always been judged: Their looks, and which men they’re romantically attached to or sleeping with.
Guadalupe’s story, on the other hand, explains the reason why so many of the invisible women in the business are drawn in. Financial Need. Experience. Family. Lack of other options. Ambition. Agency.
As long as we focus solely on the Emmas, we will fail to understand how and why women move in organized crime, and how we can better address the factors and dynamics that make it so attractive to thousands of women, as well as men, around the world.