El Chapo’s Wife Speaks: Emma Coronel Shares Highs and Lows of Marriage to Drug Cartel Boss

Now 36, Coronel maintains that Guzmán never talked about what he did for a living, she never asked about it, “nor did I watch him working.”

Meanwhile, she got used to living in Culiacán—the capital of Sinaloa—and seeing Guzmán at his hideouts on weekends.

To visit, she’d leave her phone at home to avoid being tracked, and take a circuitous route that could involve multiple vehicles—”There were times that I had to leave in a car, then go into a store, leave through the back door and get into another car”—and small planes that landed on “clandestine air strips” in rural areas.

“For me, that was a normal life,” she said. “Now I realize it wasn’t normal.”