Judge orders “El Chapo’s” wife to stay in jail
(KYMA, KECY) - A judge orders Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's wife, Emma Coronel, to remain temporarily in jail after a drug trafficking arrest.
Coronel was arrested on Monday at Dulles International Airport in Virginia after being accused of helping El Chapo run his multibillion-dollar cartel and plot his escape from a Mexican prison in 2015.
Coronel, has two young daughters with Guzman.
As Mexico’s most powerful drug lord, Guzman ran a cartel responsible for smuggling mountains of cocaine and other drugs into the United States during his 25-year reign, prosecutors said in recent court papers.
They also said his “army of sicarios,” or “hitmen,” was under orders to kidnap, torture, and kill anyone who got in his way.
Her father, Ines Coronel Barreras, was arrested in 2013 with one of his sons and several other men in a warehouse with hundreds of pounds of marijuana across the border from Douglas, Arizona.
Months earlier, the U.S. Treasury had announced financial sanctions against her father for his alleged drug trafficking.
Mike Vigil, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s former chief of international operations says Coronel could be willing to cooperate, "She has a huge motivation, and that is her twins.”