Saturday, November 23, 2024

After pleading for mercy, El Chapo’s wife gets 3 years for drug charges

The wife of the convicted drug trafficker and former Sinaloa Cartel chief Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was handed a three-year jail sentence in a United States court on Tuesday after she requested leniency from the judge.

California-born dual citizen Emma Coronel Aispuro, 32, was on trial on charges of drug trafficking and financial crimes, and faced the possibility of life imprisonment. 

She pleaded guilty in June to three counts of conspiring to distribute illegal drugs, conspiring to launder money and of engaging in financial dealings with the Sinaloa Cartel. She also admitted to aiding her husband’s audacious escape from a maximum security prison in México state in 2015. 

Federal prosecutors had asked for a lenient four-year prison term, considering that she would also be forfeiting US $1.5 million as part of her sentence.

The former beauty queen has nine-year-old twin daughters with Guzmán, who was sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. in July 2019 on charges of drug trafficking, conspiracy, kidnapping and murder

Coronel pleaded for mercy from U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras at the hearing on Tuesday.

“With all due respect, I address you today to express my true regret for any and all harm that I may have done, and I ask that you and all the citizens of this country forgive me,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter.

She added she feared a harsh sentence due to her husband’s infamy.

“Perhaps for this reason you feel there is a need for you to be harder on me, but I pray that you do not do that,” she said.

Federal prosecutor Anthony Nardozzi said Coronel’s involvement in the organization was minor. “While the overall effect of the defendant’s conduct was significant, the defendant’s actual role was a minimal one. The defendant acted primarily in support of her husband,” he said. 

Nardozzi added that after her arrest she “quickly accepted responsibility for her criminal conduct.”

Coronel’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, who also represented Guzmán in 2019, said she deserved leniency. “She met Joaquin Guzmán when she was a minor. She was 17 years old, and she married him on her 18th birthday … I’m not sure that she could ever go back home,” he said. 

Judge Contreras said he took Coronel’s background into consideration, and weighed up the well-being of her daughters in the sentence, given their father’s imprisonment. 

“Good luck to you,” Contreras told her as the hearing concluded. “I hope that you raise your twins in a different environment than you’ve experienced today.”

With reports from Reuters 

Have something to say? Paid Subscribers get all access to make & read comments.
CJNG drug lord Cristian "El Guacho" Gutiérrez Ochoa poses for a photo holding a rooster

CJNG leader ‘El Guacho’ arrested in California after faking his own death

0
As prosecutors closed in on the cartel, one leader faked his death and fled to live in the U.S. under a new identity.
A group of migrants gather in the courtyard of a compound in Oaxaca, shortly after their rescue by government officials

174 migrants, including 41 minors, rescued in Oaxaca

0
Officials reported that some of those rescued were being held against their will.
Celebrity chef Guy Fieri, left, and rocker Sammy Hagar, right, holding boxes and a bottle of their brand of tequila, Santo as they pose for a publicity photo

Did someone steal 24,240 bottles of Guy Fieri’s tequila?

3
Details are still unclear, but what is known is that a delivery of US $385,000 of Santos tequila – a brand founded by Fieri and Sammy Hagar in 2017 – has vanished en route from Jalisco.