Emma Coronel speaks about her marriage to El Chapo and apologizes to the victims of violence: ‘I sympathize with those who have suffered’

Emma Coronel has fond memories of her marriage to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, but, as she reveals in a new documentary, she still wonders what her life would have been like if she hadn’t married the infamous leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. In the production Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel Speaks — from the true crime channel Oxygen — the former beauty queen offers intimate details about her relationship with the drug lord and her life outside of prison.

In the documentary, Coronel explained that she met Guzmán while trying to gather votes for a beauty contest at age 17. At the party, she was told that an important man would be there and wanted to dance with her, but when the drug lord arrived, she didn’t recognize him. “When I say that, people ask me: ‘How could you not know? How could you not have known if he was even on TV?’ But we didn’t have one at home,” she said.

Coronel was born in California but grew up in a modest community in the Mexican state of Durango, where, she notes, it was common for people to grow marijuana to survive. From a young age, she normalized this environment and developed a negative view of authorities. “I grew up seeing and believing the government was bad. It’s like: either you starve, or you do what you have to do to survive,” she said.

By the time she met him, El Chapo was already wanted by authorities, so it became normal to have a long-distance relationship, with occasional visits to the mountains where he was in hiding. Although their union was never legally formalized, Coronel recalls spending time together watching movies and eating enchiladas she prepared. However, she has insisted she never witnessed her husband’s criminal activities. “He didn’t talk to me about his work, I didn’t ask him about it, and I never saw him while he was working,” she said.

Until that point, the former beauty queen had lived relatively shielded from regional violence thanks to her partner’s protection, but the birth of their daughters placed her in the public eye. It was during a carefully organized but discreet family gathering at a hotel in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, that El Chapo was arrested for the second time in 2003. “I think that was the moment I was most afraid because my daughters were in the next room. I was afraid of dying,” she recounted in the documentary.

Her life changed forever after that. Alongside her husband’s escapes, subsequent arrests, and eventual extradition to the United States came her own legal troubles. In 2021, U.S. authorities charged Coronel with drug trafficking and money laundering, for which she spent two and a half years in prison.

Although she sometimes evaded the documentary filmmakers’ questions — for example, refusing to discuss Guzmán’s prison escapes — she said she has had time to reflect and apologized to those who have suffered from organized crime violence. “I sympathize with all the people who have lost a loved one, who have suffered. I am truly sorry,” she said.

Since her release from prison, Coronel has embraced a more public profile: in 2024, she appeared in a music video for a corrido telling her story and has resumed her modeling career, even walking the runway at Milan Fashion Week. Still, she admits in the documentary that “it hasn’t been easy,” and prefers to take things one day at a time.

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