By Sarah N. Lynch and Mark Hosenball
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The wife of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Emma Coronel Aispuro, is expected to plead guilty on Thursday in Washington, where she has been accused of helping her husband run the Sinaloa cartel of smugglers, federal court records show.
Coronel is slated to appear for a virtual hearing at 10 a.m. ET (1400 GMT) before U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras.
Reuters could not immediately determine what charges she will plead guilty to, and there was no additional information on the court docket.
Coronel, a former beauty queen, was arrested in February on allegations that she relayed messages to help Guzman conduct drug trafficking from 2012 to early 2014, and continued delivering messages while visiting him in a Mexican prison following his February 2014 arrest.
Prosecutors have also said she conspired in Guzman’s famous July 2015 escape from the Altiplano prison in Mexico through a mile-long tunnel dug from his cell, and began plotting another escape following his January 2016 capture by Mexican authorities.
Guzman was convicted in February 2019 in a high-profile Brooklyn trial of masterminding a multibillion dollar drug enterprise for the Sinaloa cartel.
(Reporting by Mark Hosenball and Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by David Gregorio)
