El Chapo's Wife Speaks: Emma Coronel Shares Highs and Lows of Marriage to Drug Cartel Boss

El Chapo's Wife Speaks: Emma Coronel Shares Highs and Lows of Marriage to Drug Cartel Boss

In Oxygen's Married to El Chapo, beauty queen Emma Coronel broke her silence on her relationship with imprisoned drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán, who's serving a life sentence.

Emma Coronel insists she had no idea who Joaquin Guzmán Loera was when she met him in 2007.

She said the ranch she grew up on in the Mexican state of Durango had no running water or electricity, and therefore no TV. So, she didn't know that the older man who wanted to dance with her at a party one night was the notorious drug lord known as "El Chapo," head of the murderous Sinaloa cartel.

"Honestly, the Emma of those times, I don't know if she really thought much about the future, or if she was just living and surviving in the present," Coronel said in the Oxygen documentary Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel Speaks. "I was young, immature, inexperienced. And he was 50 years old."

Coronel was a 17-year-old aspiring model when she met Guzmán, who at the time had been a fugitive for six years since his first escape from prison in 2001.

Guzmán is now serving a life sentence at a supermax prison in Colorado after being found guilty in February 2019 of running an international drug trafficking network.

But when he visited her family's ranch for the first time 18 years ago, arriving by helicopter while she was hanging laundry to dry, Coronel recalled, "I was just thinking, 'You blew all my clothes away and covered everything in dust.'"

And yet he was "very handsome, interesting, energetic," she said. "That's what caught my attention, what made me want to be around him."

Ted Bourne

Coronel was soon crowned Reina del Café y la Guayaba (Coffee and Guava Festival Queen) in Canelas, a moment she remains proud of to this day, despite rumors that her relationship with Guzmán influenced her win.

On July 2, 2007, her 18th birthday, she married Guzmán who was already married and never divorced his first wife, Alejandrina Salazar in a "symbolic wedding" at her family's ranch, with Coronel explaining that they didn't have a "civil union."

But, she noted, "It doesn't excite me to talk about my wedding or my life," adding, "I wouldn’t say it provokes anything in me anymore other than sadness.