Emma Coronel has fond recollections of her marriage to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, however, as she reveals in a brand new documentary, she nonetheless wonders what her life would have been like if she hadn’t married the notorious chief of the Sinaloa Cartel. In the manufacturing Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel Speaks — from the true crime channel Oxygen — the previous magnificence queen gives intimate particulars about her relationship with the drug lord and her life outdoors of jail.
In the documentary, Coronel defined that she met Guzmán whereas attempting to assemble votes for a magnificence contest at age 17. At the get together, she was informed that an essential man could be there and needed to bop together with her, however when the drug lord arrived, she didn’t acknowledge him. “When I say that, folks ask me: ‘How may you not know? How may you not have identified if he was even on TV?’ But we didn’t have one at house,” she stated.
Coronel was born in California however grew up in a modest group within the Mexican state of Durango, the place, she notes, it was widespread for folks to develop marijuana to outlive. From a younger age, she normalized this setting and developed a unfavorable view of authorities. “I grew up seeing and believing the federal government was unhealthy. It’s like: both you starve, otherwise you do what you must do to outlive,” she stated.
By the time she met him, El Chapo was already needed by authorities, so it grew to become regular to have a long-distance relationship, with occasional visits to the mountains the place he was in hiding. Although their union was by no means legally formalized, Coronel recollects spending time collectively watching films and consuming enchiladas she ready. However, she has insisted she by no means witnessed her husband’s prison actions. “He didn’t speak to me about his work, I didn’t ask him about it, and I by no means noticed him whereas he was working,” she stated.
Until that time, the previous magnificence queen had lived comparatively shielded from regional violence because of her accomplice’s safety, however the beginning of their daughters positioned her within the public eye. It was throughout a rigorously organized however discreet household gathering at a lodge in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, that El Chapo was arrested for the second time in 2003. “I feel that was the second I used to be most afraid as a result of my daughters have been within the subsequent room. I used to be afraid of dying,” she recounted within the documentary.
Her life modified eternally after that. Alongside her husband’s escapes, subsequent arrests, and eventual extradition to the United States got here her personal authorized troubles. In 2021, U.S. authorities charged Coronel with drug trafficking and cash laundering, for which she spent two and a half years in jail.
Although she typically evaded the documentary filmmakers’ questions — for instance, refusing to debate Guzmán’s jail escapes — she stated she has had time to replicate and apologized to those that have suffered from organized crime violence. “I sympathize with all of the individuals who have misplaced a cherished one, who’ve suffered. I’m actually sorry,” she stated.
Since her launch from jail, Coronel has embraced a extra public profile: in 2024, she appeared in a music video for a corrido telling her story and has resumed her modeling profession, even strolling the runway at Milan Fashion Week. Still, she admits within the documentary that “it hasn’t been straightforward,” and prefers to take issues in the future at a time.
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