The wife of jailed Mexico drug trafficker Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman will appear in a U.S. federal court Tuesday.
She was arrested at Dulles International Airport in Virginia on Monday for her alleged involvement in the trade, the U.S. Justice Department said. Coronel was charged in a one-count complaint with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines into the U.S., according to the Justice Department.
Former beauty queen Emma Coronel Aispuro, a citizen of Mexico and the U.S., is accused of helping her husband operate his multibillion-dollar drug cartel and plot his escape from a Mexico detention facility in 2015.
Coronel attended almost every day of her husband's three-month court proceedings in New York which heard accounts of rape and murder and allegations her husband spied on her and his mistresses.
Coronel was reprimanded twice after she slipped a mobile phone into the courtroom and was able to communicate with Guzman
Coronel married Guzman on her 18th birthday. The couple have two daughters.
"Coronel has been involved in the drug scheme since she was a little girl. She knows the inner workings of the Sinaloa cartel," Mike Vigil, the Drug Enforcement Administration's former director of international operations, told The Associated Press.
Guzman was sentenced to life in jail in 2019. Guzman was the leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel.
Guzman was listed No. 701 on Forbes' 2009 ranking of the world's wealthiest men with an estimated value of $1 billion.
