El Chapo’s wife Emma Coronel says the feared cartel boss wooed her as a 17-year-old beauty queen after a dancefloor mix-up, and later “spoke to me as if I were a baby”
El Chapo’s wife has revealed how they met when she was just 17 and the cartel boss’ “gentleman” chat-up line. She said their infamous romance began with a dancefloor mix-up when she was still a teen.
Emma Coronel Aispuro, now 37, has debuted as an online streamer and used a nearly six-hour broadcast on Kick with Mexican influencers Víctor Ordóñez and Texas-based Guillermo Peña to tell her version of events. From beauty-queen beginnings to a US prison cell, she candidly spilled the beans.
The stream drew more than 13,000 live viewers. Coronel said she first met Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán at a dance in 2007, months after she was crowned queen of a beauty pageant in Canelas, in Mexico’s northern state of Durango.
She recalled: “We were dancing, he with a young woman and I with someone else, but he thought I smiled at him when, in reality, I was laughing with my friend.” Despite his terrifying reputation as Sinaloa Cartel co-founder, she insisted he was polite from the start.
“He was very respectful,” Coronel said. “At first, he asked if I wanted to dance – sort of asking permission to invite me – and later sent me flowers.”
“He was a gentleman with me.” She also debunked the TV portrayals of a lavish narco wedding, the New York Post reported.
“It was a very private affair, just with people very close to me,” she said, adding they married on her 18th birthday at a hard-to-reach ranch in La Angostura. Coronel claimed the life she entered was already closing in on him.
“By the time I came into his life, he was already a different person… He could no longer travel or move about freely… I arrived when things had already become more complicated,” she said.
She hasn’t seen him since July 17, 2019, when he was sentenced to life in prison, and said US prison authorities have barred her and their twin daughters from contact. And in her most personal revelation, she admitted what she misses isn’t the money or power – but his odd tenderness.
“He used to speak to me as if I were a baby,” she said. “That’s what I miss the most, because no one has ever spoken to me like that again.”
Coronel served 36 months in the US for drug trafficking and money laundering, and described her first year in solitary in Alexandria, Virginia, USA. “It’s the most intense thing that can happen to a person… It’s awful imagining what’s going on outside,” she said.
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