“I Fear For His Life”: El Chapo’s Wife Speaks Out For The First Time

The wife of Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman opened up about her life with the leader of the Sinaloa cartel for the first time, saying that she fears for her husband's life now that he is back in custody. "I fear for his life... We don't know what his situation is because we haven't seen him," Emma Coronel Aispuro said in an interview televised by Telemundo, according to quotes translated by NBC News. "They want to make him pay for his escape. They say that they are not punishing him. Of course they are." The interview, which aired Sunday night, was conducted by Anabel Hernández, a journalist with the University of California, Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Program. It marked Coronel Aispuro's first public comments during her eight-year marriage to Guzman. Guzman was recaptured by Mexican authorities in January, six months after his daring escape from a maximum-security prison there. Federal prosecutors in the U.S. say the 58-year-old orchestrated "hundreds of killings, assaults, kidnappings" in his role as leader of the notorious drug trafficking network, as Hernández noted in a Los Angeles Times piece about the interview.

But Coronel Aispuro, a former beauty queen who married the drug kingpin in 2007 when she was 18, defended her husband, saying he treats her like his "queen" and has never acted violently in her presence. "He is like any other man — of course he is not violent, not rude," Coronel Aispuro said, according to the LA Times. "I have never heard him say a bad word. I have never seen him get excited or be upset at anyone." Read more — and watch clips of the interview — on the websites of Telemundo, the LA Times, and NBC News.