[imagesource: Drew Angerer / Getty Images]

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman might be behind bars, but his criminal empire is still ticking along.

That’s due in part to the efforts of his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, a 31-year-old former beauty queen, who was arrested yesterday at Dulles International Airport in Virginia.

She’s expected to appear in federal court in Washington today, reports TIME:

Her arrest is the latest twist in the bloody, multinational saga involving Guzman, the longtime head of the Sinaloa drug cartel…

And now his wife, with whom he has two young daughters, has been charged with helping him run his criminal empire. In a single-count criminal complaint, Coronel was charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana in the U.S.

The Justice Department also accused her of helping her husband escape from a Mexican prison in 2015 and participating in the planning of a second prison escape before Guzman was extradited to the U.S.

If you’re not familiar with the sheer audacity of those two prison escapes, here’s a refresher:

In one case, he escaped through an entry under the shower in his cell to a milelong (1.6-kilometer-long) lighted tunnel with a motorcycle on rails.

Image: Sky News

The planning for the escape was extensive, prosecutors say, with his wife playing a key role.

Coronel is accused of organising the construction of the tunnel, purchasing land close to the prison where Guzman was held, acquiring guns and armoured trucks in case the escape turned violent, and fitting Guzman with a GPS watch so they could track his whereabouts.

Guzman first escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001, and remained on the run for 13 years before being recaptured.

Coronel’s father was arrested back in 2013, for his involvement in the shipping of hundreds of pounds of marijuana across the US / Mexico border.

Sheesh, talk about a family business:

Mike Vigil, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s former chief of international operations, said Coronel “has been involved in the drug trade since she was a little girl. She knows the inner workings of the Sinaloa cartel.”

Vigil believes that Coronel may well cooperate, given that she has twin children to look after.

If she does help law enforcement, they better nail the witness protection programme, because the Sinaloa cartel doesn’t take kindly to snitches.

Here’s more on Coronel via The Independent:

Born in California in 1989, she met El Chapo as a teenager in about 2007. They married two years later at the age of 18, when he was 47.

“I would say what won me over was his way of talking, how he treated me, the way we began to get along – first as friends and from that came everything else,” she said in a 2016 interview…

Often referred to as a former beauty queen, her crown from the Coffee and Guava Festival is said to have been won with the influence of El Chapo himself.

I can’t say I blame the judges for awarding her the title.

El Chapo isn’t the sort of man you want to upset.

[sources:time&independent]