Emma Coronel Aispuro, wife of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman, arrives at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York,
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Emma Coronel surprised social media users after joining a viral trend revisiting memories from 2016, but her post stood out sharply from the rest. The former wife of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán shared an unpublished photograph from that year, the same moment when the former leader of the Sinaloa cartel was captured for the third and final time in Los Mochis, Mexico. The image, posted to her Instagram Stories, immediately drew attention for its timing and historical weight.
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In the photo, Coronel appears almost unrecognizable compared with the fashion-forward figure seen today at international events. Wearing her signature jet-black hair from that period, she is pictured smiling alongside her sister, Claudia Coronel Aispuro, during what appears to be a private gathering. What unsettled followers was not the image itself, but the date. The year 2016 marked a turning point not only in Guzmán's criminal trajectory, but also in Coronel's life. Nearly a decade has passed since that arrest, widely seen as the definitive collapse of the Guzmán Loera empire.
Emma Coronel/Instagram Stories/Courtesy
At the time, Coronel had been married to Guzmán for 11 years, having wed him in July 2007. In 2016, she maintained a low public profile and did not have social media accounts. She was living in the United States with the couple's twin daughters, María Joaquina and Emaly Guadalupe, who were five years old at the time. In later court statements, Coronel said she only saw her husband when everything was "somewhat normal" in his activities, offering rare insight into the distance that defined their relationship during those years.
Guzmán's arrest on January 8, 2016, carried out under the intelligence operation known as "Black Swan," was one of the most complex law enforcement efforts in modern Mexican history. It came months after his dramatic escape from the Altiplano prison through a tunnel, an event that once again placed Coronel under intense scrutiny. After that escape in 2015, she largely vanished from the public eye. By the morning of his recapture, her status shifted to that of the wife of a fugitive, a development that would later lead to her own legal troubles in the United States.
Today, Coronel's reality looks markedly different. After serving her sentence and regaining her freedom, she has rebuilt her public image, reemerging as a fashion and social media figure and distancing herself from her past. In 2016, at 26 years old, her appearance reflected the trends of the time, long straight black hair, heavier makeup, sharply defined eyebrows, dramatic false lashes and nude or bold red lipstick. The resurfaced photo has become a stark reminder of how far her life has shifted since one of the most infamous moments in modern criminal history.
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