El Chapo’s wife will be transferred from prison to a shelter before her release in September
Wife of drug kingpin El Chapo is being transferred from Texas prison to a halfway house in California where she will serve the remainder of her three-year sentence before being released in September
- Emma Coronel was sentenced in November 2021 after pleading guilty to three charges, including international drug trafficking and money laundering
- On May 30, she was transferred to the shelter
- She can leave during the day for work, class or therapy
The wife of notorious drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán will serve the remainder of her three-year prison sentence in a halfway house in California.
Emma Coronel was transferred on May 30 from Federal Medical Center Carswell (FMC) in Fort Worth, Texas, to a facility operated by Residential Reentry Management (RMM) Long Beach.
The 31-year-old has been in federal custody since February 2021 and pleaded guilty to international drug trafficking, money laundering and a criminal violation of the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act in June 2021.
A federal court in Washington, D.C. sentenced her to three years in November 2021, including four years under supervision.
A Bureau of Prison official told Univision Noticias that Coronel had a choice of being incarcerated in a residence or a shelter.
Emma Coronel, the wife of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, will serve the remaining three months of her three-year sentence at a California shelter
Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán has 11-year-old twin daughters with his wife Emma Coronel, who is expected to be released from federal custody in September
Coronel, mother of 11-year-old twin daughters, chose the latter and will be released on September 13.
While at the shelter, she is eligible to leave the site during the day for work, classes, or therapy.
Coronel faced a much longer prison sentence than the 36 months she received after her legal team, who also represented El Chapo at his high-profile trial in New York, argued on her behalf for a sentence below the mandatory maximum if she came forward with everything she knew about the Sinaloa Cartel.
Under the safety valve exception, Coronel was required to ‘tell the government everything it knows about the crime and all related misconduct’.
Her criminal activities began in 2011 and continued until at least January 19, 2017, according to court documents.
Emma Coronel pleaded guilty to international drug trafficking, money laundering and a criminal violation of the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act in June 2021
Emma Coronel will be released from prison on September 13, 2023
Coronel admitted that he acted as an intermediary between El Chapo and other members of the transnational criminal organization during his incarceration in Mexico’s Altiplano Prison following his February 2014 arrest.
As part of the plot to help El Chapo escape prison, she bought property near the prison and gave him a watch with a GPS tracking device.
It was used to help the hired construction workers “dig a tunnel from that nearby property, under the prison” to his prison cell.
The notorious drug lord escaped in July 2015 and was recaptured in January 2016. He was extradited to the United States in January 2017 and sentenced to life in prison in July 2019.
In a book written by veteran Mexican crime reporter Anabel Hernández, Coronel described her marriage to El Chapo as “very normal” and claimed never to have witnessed the dark side of her leading husband, who was known to turn his rivals into kidnapped, tortured and murdered. .
‘He’s a man like any other. He’s not violent, he’s not rude,” she said in the book. “I’ve never heard him say a bad word, I’ve never seen him get excited or mad at anyone.”