Emma Coronel, the wife of jailed Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, has been released from prison in the United States.
She pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges and was sentenced to three years in prison in November 2021, a sentence later reduced.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed his release.
The 34-year-old is believed to have left a halfway house in California, where she was transferred from federal prison in June.
Her husband is serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison in Colorado.
Last month he sent a handwritten letter asking that his wife and their two daughters be allowed to visit him in the maximum security prison.
El Chapo Guzmán, 66, was found guilty in 2019 of running the Sinaloa Cartel.
The Mexico-based transnational criminal organization has smuggled more than 1,000 tons of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin into the United States, according to U.S. law enforcement estimates.
Cartel hitmen have kidnapped, tortured and killed members of rival gangs to consolidate its power.
The Sinaloa Cartel also bribed high-ranking police officers and politicians in Mexico and throughout Central America to turn a blind eye to drug shipments or even inform the cartel of impending raids.
Emma Coronel first met Guzmán when she was 17 and competing in a local beauty pageant.
His father, Inés Coronel, was a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel and is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Mexico for drug trafficking.
Guzmán ran the cartel from various hideouts in northern Mexico after escaping prison in a laundry cart in 2001.
They formalized their relationship during a ceremony when Emma Coronel was 18, although it is unclear whether their marriage was ever officially registered with Mexican authorities.
Coronel, who holds dual U.S.-Mexican citizenship, traveled to California in 2011 to give birth to the couple’s twin daughters, a move that means the children have U.S. citizenship.
In 2014, Guzmán was arrested after a 13-year manhunt and sent to the maximum security Altiplano prison in Mexico.
It took Guzmán just 17 months to escape again, this time through a tunnel complete with ventilation shafts and a motorcycle on rails that led from his cell to a nearby warehouse.
At trial, prosecutors said Coronel had played a key role in her husband’s escape.
She was also accused of acting as a messenger for her husband both while on the run and behind bars, relaying orders to cartel lieutenants and children by his previous wives, known as Chapitos (Little Chapos).
After his tunnel escape in 2015, Guzmán managed to evade capture for six months before Mexican special forces finally captured him outside Los Mochis, in his home state of Sinaloa.
He was extradited to the United States a year later and tried in New York.
Coronel appeared in the Brooklyn courtroom daily.
Impeccably dressed and perfectly groomed, she smiled and waved to him from the public gallery.
She told the New York Times that she did not acknowledge the gruesome testimony given about her husband in court, instead describing him as “an excellent father, friend, brother, son, partner.”
When Guzmán was found guilty in February 2019, the couple endorsed each other.
Coronel remained free for nearly two more years until her arrest at Dulles Airport, near Washington DC, in February 2021.
Prosecutors said she was well aware of her husband’s criminal activities and “understood the extent of the Sinaloa Cartel’s drug trafficking.”
She pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and money laundering.
At his sentencing, Coronel asked for clemency for the sake of his children. “Please do not allow them to grow up without the presence of a mother,” he told the judge.
She was sentenced to three years in prison, which was later reduced, paving the way for her release today.
Her future plans are unclear, but her husband’s letter asking to see him suggests she may travel to Oregon to visit him.
In the letter, Guzmán explains that the couple’s daughters, now 12, “study in Mexico and can only visit their father during the holidays, two or three times a year at most.”