The wife of imprisoned Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Emma Coronel Aispuro, will be released in Los Angeles on Wednesday. She was arrested in 2021 on drug trafficking charges, as per the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
Born in U.S. the 34-year-old was sentenced in November 2021 to three years in federal prison in the wake of confessing to three counts of assisting the Sinaloa Cartel, including connivance to launder money, distribute illegal drugs—cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana for import into the U.S. and taking part in financial dealings.
She likewise owned up to acting as a dispatch between El Chapo, who headed the cartel, and other members of the organisation while he was being held in Mexico’s Altiplano jail after his 2014 arrest and aiding in his escape.
Her condemning adjudicator said Coronel had in short order acknowledged liability and consented to relinquish almost $1.5million of proceeds from her criminal activity to the U.S. government, and her three-year sentence was subsequently decreased.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons said on its website it would set Coronel Aispuro free on Wednesday from a low-security confinement institution in Los Angeles. However, it did not give any further details.
Coronel Aispuro was moved from a federal prison in Texas, to a halfway house in Long Beach, California, in June, before her release.
It is a common practice for detainees who have shown appropriate conduct in federal prisons to be moved to a halfway house before their release, according to an official of the Bureau of Prisons.
In the meantime, El Chapo is serving his life imprisonment in U.S. after being extradited there in 2017 following two escapes from Mexican maximum-security prisons, once by digging a mile-long tunnel from his cell.
Coronel Aispuro’s lawyers didn’t promptly respond to a request for comment. It isn’t clear whether she must face drug trafficking charges and other charges for other crimes in Mexico.
Coronel Aispuro was likewise given a further two years of supervised release.
She has nine-year-old twin daughters with El Chapo, whom she met when she was a young beauty queen and married him in 2007 at the age of 18.
Last month, El Chapo wrote to the federal judge who directed his case, requesting Coronel Aispuro and their young daughters to visit him at the supermax jail, as per a handwritten letter acquired by CBS News.