Drug lord El Chapo’s wife ‘reborn’ on Milan catwalk
The wife of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the Mexican drug lord, has appeared on the catwalk at Milan Fashion Week a year after being released from prison.
Emma Coronel Aispuro, 35, a former model who married El Chapo when she was a teenager, appeared in a regal wedding dress as part of what the designer called her “rebirth”.
Ms Coronel was sentenced to three years in prison in 2021 after pleading guilty to charges related to helping her husband’s Sinaloa cartel, including taking part in his escape from custody in 2015.
Prosecutors determined she “worked closely with the command and control structure” of the cartel.
Under her plea deal, she agreed to hand over about $1.5 million in illicit funds from the cartel. Her sentence was later reduced and she was freed from jail in September last year.
El Chapo, 67, whose criminal empire was known for its brutality and murderous rampages, continues to serve a life sentence – without the possibility of parole – in a supermax prison in Colorado.
Ms Coronel’s father, Inés Coronel, was also a senior member of the Sinaloa cartel and is serving a 10-year sentence in Mexico for drug smuggling.
However, on Sunday, Ms Coronel, who has both Mexican and US citizenship, dispatched with her “past marked with controversy” in a bid to “rewrite her future”, according to LA-based designer April Black Diamond, who made the cartel wife the star of her spring/summer 2024 collection.
Her surprise return to the modelling world took place in Palazzo Serbelloni, a neoclassical palace in Milan, where Napoleon once lived.
Ms Coronel wore a tiara and a heavy white gown adorned with jewels.
“As a designer, I believe everyone deserves a second chance, and fashion is the perfect platform to highlight transformation, strength, and resilience,” Ms Diamond wrote on Instagram last week.
The designer, who dresses the Hollywood elite and specialises in lavish party dresses, added that her work celebrated “resilience, rebirth, and the beauty of transformation on this global stage”.
Mariel Colón Miró, a model and lawyer who was part of El Chapo’s defence team in the US, also joined Ms Coronel on the catwalk at Sunday’s event.
‘Right to fulfil our dreams’
“We all have the right to fulfil our dreams and to be reborn like the bird and start over,” she wrote on social media.
One woman, who did not want to be named but who represents mothers whose family members have been killed in cartel violence, was relaxed about Ms Coronel’s catwalk appearance.
She told the Telegraph: “She does have a right to her own working life, regardless of what her husband has done, especially as he is in prison.”
Ms Coronel became a beauty queen at age 17, winning her first pageant in Canelas, Mexico, in 2007. She met her future husband the same year.
In an interview, she told the LA Times: “He flirtatiously smiled at me. After a while a person told me, ‘The man asks if you want to dance with him’. And I said, ‘OK’.”
After a whirlwind romance, she became El Chapo’s third wife at the age of 18, while he was 50.
They share twin daughters, Emaly and Maria Joaquina, born in 2011, who are believed to be the youngest of 19 children the cartel boss has fathered.
