Wife of drug kingpin El Chapo arrested on U.S. drug charges

She is charged in a single-count prison grievance with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana within the U.S.

The Justice Division additionally accuses her of serving to her husband escape from a Mexican jail in 2015 and taking part within the planning of a second jail escape earlier than Guzman was extradited to the U.S. in January 2017.

Coronel Aispuro remained in custody, and it was not instantly clear if she had an lawyer who might touch upon the allegations.

Guzman, Mexico’s strongest drug lord, escaped by a gap beneath the bathe in his cell resulting in a 1.6-kilometre-long lighted tunnel with a bike on rails. The planning for the escape was intensive, prosecutors say, together with his spouse enjoying a key function.

Courtroom papers cost that Coronel Aispuro labored with Guzman’s sons and a witness, who’s now co-operating with the U.S. authorities, to arrange the development of the underground tunnel that Guzman used to flee from the Altiplano jail in Mexico to stop him from being extradited to the U.S.

The plot included buying a bit of land close to the jail, firearms and an armoured truck and smuggling him a GPS watch so they may “pinpoint his actual whereabouts in order to assemble the tunnel with an entry level accessible to him,” the court docket papers say.

Guzman was sentenced to life behind bars in 2019. His Sinaloa cartel was liable for smuggling mountains of cocaine and different medicine into america beneath his 25-year leasdership, prosecutors mentioned in current court docket papers. Additionally they mentioned his “military of sicarios,” or “hit males,” was beneath orders to kidnap, torture and kill anybody who acquired in his approach.

Coronel Aispuro, a former teen magnificence queen, commonly attended Guzman’s trial, even when testimony forged her in a harsh gentle. The 2, separated in age by greater than 30 years, have been collectively since not less than 2007 and have twin daughters, who had been born in 2011.

Her father, Ines Coronel Barreras, was arrested in Mexico in 2013 with one in every of his sons and several other different males in a warehouse with lots of of kilos of marijuana throughout the border from Douglas, Ariz. Months earlier, the U.S. Treasury had introduced monetary sanctions towards Coronel Barreras for his alleged drug trafficking.

After Guzman was re-arrested following his escape, Coronel Aispuro lobbied the Mexican authorities to enhance her husband’s jail circumstances. And after he was convicted in 2019, she moved to launch a clothes line in his identify.