Emma Coronel, El Chapo’s wife, plans a return to the spotlight

After spending two and a half years behind bars for drug trafficking, getting back her freedom and disappearing temporarily from public life, Emma Coronel, 35, wants to return to the spotlight. The wife of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera — who used to be one of the world’s most powerful drug lords, and is now serving a sentence of life in prison at a maximum-security prison in the United States — will star in the music video for a song about her own life. The corrido — a traditional Mexican ballad — is sung by Mariel Colón Miró, the artistic name of La Abogada (The Lawyer), a member of the controversial legal team that defended El Chapo in his battle with the U.S. justice system, as well as Coronel and the multimillionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Now, La Abogada is a performer.

To promote her entry into the world of Mexican regional music, Coronel spoke on Monday to the program Despierta América (Wake Up America), hosted by María Antonieta Collins on Univision, one of the most popular channels for the U.S. Latino population. It was a 10-minute interview, in which Collins avoided questions about Coronel’s connection to the cartel and other delicate matters, and focused on depicting her as a new woman who is focused on business, who has left the past behind and is now “freer,” as the host put it. El Chapo’s wife wasn’t very eloquent in her responses, either.

—Doesn’t it weigh on you that, well, you’re going to return to being in the public eye and that has both good and bad consequences?

—Well yes, but it’s like everything else, no? Everything has bad consequences, everything has good consequences and at the end of the day, something always comes up, why not do something that benefits me? Because I see it as something good. They hired me to work as a model on my friend’s project and that was my song.

The most famous woman of Mexico’s drug trafficking underworld has a new look: after the loose black hair she sported during her husband’s trial, she has transitioned to a blonde shade pulled back into a ponytail; pink lips; eyeshadow; a white, light summer outfit. But some bad habits are hard to leave behind. El Chapo’s wife is not distancing herself from the cartels, not even after serving time.

The person behind the song is Mario “El Cachorro” Delgado, a narcocorridos composer who also wrote Un Corrido Pa Joaquín (A Corrido For Joaquín, a denialist exaltation of El Chapo’s bloodthirsty past that presents the narco as an innocent victim of the U.S. system: “Se pasaron de la raya y en su conciencia estará / no soy asesino en serie, nomás soy Joaquín Guzmán / siempre me gustó el negocio, pero supe respetar / y si alguien probó mi furia fue porque se portó mal” (“They went too far and it will remain on their conscience / I’m not a serial killer, I’m just Joaquín Guzmán / I’ve always liked business, but I knew to show respect / and if anyone tasted my fury it was because they behaved badly”.)

The new track, which will be called La Señora (narco slang for the capo’s partner), is scheduled to be released this week. “I listened when they were writing it, the entire song, to what every part said, for me, it’s important and it resonated, I mean, it’s about me and everything that has happened in my life,” said Coronel in the interview. Why did she decide to appear in the music video? “I’ve always dreamed about becoming a model, when I was a little girl, I always said I wanted to be a model,” she said.

Coronel also assessed the time she spent in the world of organized crime: “In 10 years, it seems like everything happened too quickly and too many difficult things have happened, good ones as well. Many lessons learned, good ones. It’s very difficult for me to judge a person from just seeing or listening to her or even seeing a story in the news in which they say something about that person because I was there, and news items have come out about me that have no truth to them.” Has her life changed? “Life is the same, I am the same, but with different thoughts, different teachings, I think differently now. I’m a little more reserved in how I talk about my life, I am more careful about what I say, what I don’t say. I feel like I have a lot more patience.”

In the interview, Coronel said she was “doing business,” without specifying in what field (“I still can’t say”); she said she doesn’t hold any grudges, that she would never again participate in a reality TV show, as she once did, “not for millions of dollars, it’s another kind of prison”; and even dared offer advice to the “little women”: “Understand that when difficult things happen to you, when bad things happen to you, the thing is that the past is the past, don’t get stuck in it, we have to carry on to get ahead.” Collins asked about Coronel’s relationship with El Chapo, who is still her husband, despite the fact that she has not seen him in years — Guzmán published a letter asking her and their daughters to visit him.

—He and I aren’t in contact any longer, responded Coronel.

—But the love continues.

—The love will always continue.

The ‘Kardashian of Sinaloa’

Coronel had her two weeks of fame during her husband’s trial, between 2018 and 2019. Dressed in high-end designs that highlighted her vertiginous curves, in high-heeled shoes that she had to remove every day to pass through security at the New York courthouse, she was nicked the “Kardashian of Sinaloa” just as her husband received a life sentence in prison. El Chapo has escaped from prison twice: the first time, in 2001; the second time, in 2015, allegedly through a mile-long tunnel. He was finally re-captured in 2016 and extradited to the United States one year later to prevent him from getting up to his old tricks. After his third arrest, it was only a matter of time until his wife’s fall from grace.

That wouldn’t happen until two years after El Chapo’s sentencing, in February 2021 at Dulles International Airport in Virginia. Four months later, in June, Coronel pled guilty to drug trafficking and money laundering for the Sinaloa Cartel. In November, she was sentenced to three years in prison, though she wound up only serving two and a half years, the majority of it in a minimum-security facility.

Coronel was released in September 2023. A few weeks later, she gave her first interview for a lengthy article on her life in Elle, in which she told journalist Emily Palmer her story. The tale was one of an adolescent from a small town in the mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental who impressed a drug lord when she won a beauty contest in Canelas, Durango, a small town with a population of 800. El Chapo practically bought his future wife: he gifted Coronel’s parents a Chevrolet Cheyenne 4x4 and a Mercedes-Benz.

They were wed when she turned 18, despite the fact that Guzmán Loera had other wives from which he had never divorced and many lovers. One of them, Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez, even testified against him in court, while she was watched by an unruffled Coronel. Three years after their wedding, the woman from Sinaloa gave birth to twins in a California hospital so that, like she herself, her daughters would have U.S. citizenship: a safeguard for the future. On their birth certificate, she didn’t fill in the name of their father. The years have passed and now, with a song about to be released about her story, shadowed by her drug trafficking past, Coronel insists: “Life is the same, in a different era.”

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