El Chapo's wife released from US custody

The wife of Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was released from US federal custody on Wednesday after serving nearly two years of a three-year sentence.

Emma Coronel Aispuro is a former beauty queen who married the drug kingpin when at the age of 18 in 2008. She is a dual US-Mexican citizen.

The Bureau of Prisons said she had been moved from a prison in Texas to a low-security halfway house in California prior to her release. She was also given a further two years of supervised release.

Why was El Chapo's wife in prison?

Coronel pleaded guilty in 2021 to three counts of helping Guzman's Sinaloa drug cartel, including conspiracy to launder money and distribute illegal drugs .

"The defendant was not a leader, organizer, boss or other type of manager," prosecutor Anthony Nardozzi said during her trial. "Rather she was a cog in a very large wheel of a criminal organization."

Mexico's state prosecutor's office said Coronel was not facing charges "for now."

In May, the US also imposed sanctions on the drug lord's son and three members of the Sinaloa cartel for allegedly trafficking fentanyl into the country.

Where is El Chapo now?

Meanwhile, Guzman is serving a life sentence in the US after he was extradited in 2017 following two escapes from Mexican maximum-security prisons.

Coronel previously admitted to acting as a courier for her husband while he was incarcerated in Mexico, including delivering him a GPS that enabled his spectacular prison break in 2015.

After Guzman was extradited, Coronel regularly attended her husband's trial in New York.

zc/rt (AP, Reuters, AFP)