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Three years in prison for the wife of the drug trafficker “El Chapo”

Justice was finally rather lenient with the wife of the Mexican drug trafficker “El Chapo”. Emma Coronel Aispuro, was sentenced Tuesday by a US federal judge to three years in prison after admitting her participation in the trafficking of the powerful Sinaloa cartel.

Prosecutors had asked for a four-year sentence, a lighter sentence than usual requisitions in drug trafficking cases. Magistrate Rudolph Contreras explained that the 32-year-old Mexican-American was very young when she met and then married Joaquin Guzman and cooperated with authorities after her arrest in February.

“Sincere regrets”

The young woman did not react to the pronouncement of the sentence. She had previously expressed in Spanish her “sincere regrets” for the “mistakes” she had made. Emma Coronel Aispuro was 18 when she married “El Chapo”, 32 years her senior in 2007, and had twins with him in 2011.

“The suffering I have inflicted on my family hurts me a lot,” she said, begging the court not to let her daughters grow up without their mother, they who are already deprived of their father, sentenced to life imprisonment. in 2019 in the United States. His lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, assured after the verdict that the role of the young woman within the cartel was limited to being “the wife of Mr. Guzman”. “She was involved in a lot of trafficking but she was a tiny character.”

Fear of retaliation

Emma Coronel has already spent nine months in detention since her arrest on February 22 at the Washington airport. She will also have to remain 48 months on probation after her release and has had to pay $ 1.5 million in damages to the US state. His lawyer, who will not appeal, has also firmly denied that his client has cooperated with American justice, allegations that he says will prevent him from returning to Mexico, where his family lives, because she “will always be in danger. Retaliation from the cartel.

The former beauty queen, also an influencer and apprentice designer, was initially accused of having served as an “intermediary” between El Chapo and his associates, and of having participated in the management of the Sinaloa cartel once her husband imprisoned in Mexico. In June, Emma Coronel finally pleaded guilty to three counts: involvement in drug trafficking, money laundering and transactions with a foreign drug trafficker. She admitted to having knowledge of the importation into the United States of at least 450 kg of cocaine, 90 kg of heroin, 45 kg of methamphetamine and 90 tonnes of marijuana. She also confessed to having helped “El Chapo” to escape in 2015 from a Mexican prison.

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