Emma Coronel, the wife of Mexican Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, was released from a California halfway house Wednesday (September 13), over a year before the end of her three-year sentence for her affiliation with her husband's gang.
The 33-year-old former teenage beauty queen born in San Francisco was originally sentenced to 36 months' imprisonment in November 2021 after pleading guilty to drug trafficking and money laundering conspiracy charges related to her husband's cartel.
The US Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed to the New York Post that Coronel was released from custody but would not disclose further information, the location of the transitional facility she was released from, or where she would go next.
She was initially housed at a federal prison in Texas but moved to the transitional facility in California before being released Wednesday.
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In addition to her prison sentence, she was also ordered to pay $1.5 million in fines as part of the charges laid out to her upon her arrest in February 2021 at Washington's Dulles International Airport. At the time, it was reported that she voluntarily handed herself to authorities.
Guzman escaped Mexican prisons twice - in 2001 and in 2015 - before he was eventually tracked in New York in 2016.
El Chapo was convicted in 2019 for engaging in a continual criminal enterprise and other counts of distributing tons of cocaine in the US. He is currently serving a life sentence at Colorado's ADX Florence Supermax prison, the most secure facility in the country.
Prior to sentencing, Coronel was accused of assisting her husband's 2015 escape. Recently, Guzman petitioned a judge to let Coronel and their two daughters visit him at the prison.
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