Emma Coronel, the wife of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, has been in the spotlight in recent weeks, amid a tumultuous period for the Sinaloa Cartel, debuting on the social media network TikTok and featuring in a music video that plays to the gendered tropes of narco culture.
Coronel, whose media fame now perhaps challenges that of her husband Sinaloa Cartel founder El Chapo, appeared in a music video by Mariel “La Abogada” Colón, who is a former member of both her and Chapo’s legal team. The video for the song “La Señora” celebrates Coronel’s life, her ability to roll with the punches in the male-dominated drug trafficking industry, and her marriage to El Chapo, who is now serving a life sentence in the United States. It also features a product placement for her new line of jewelry.
[embedded content]
Coronel was released from prison in the United States in September 2023 after less than three years behind bars after being sentenced for her role in her husband’s criminal empire and his final prison escape in Mexico. She has twin girls with the former drug lord and looks set to continue to commercialize her trafficking experience and connections.
Coronel’s new TikTok account gained over 3,000 followers in a day after the account’s launch, adding to her 241,000-strong Instagram following.
Her latest media appearances come weeks after El Chapo’s co-director at the Sinaloa Cartel – Ismael Zambada García, alias “El Mayo” – was arrested after decades in the drug trafficking business, a news story that went around the world.
SEE ALSO: NarcoCulture Coverage
The lyrics in the video laud Coronel as a “queen” with a “brain for business,” seemingly departing from the male-centered narrative of narco tales. However, the video focuses just as much on Coronel’s physical appearance as her material wealth, relying on existing gender stereotypes that have long dominated narco culture in Latin America.
Known in Mexico as the buchona look, a word used to describe women romantically involved with male drug traffickers, Coronel’s image and lifestyle promote extravagance and a physical appearance achievable only through cosmetic surgery.
InSight Crime Analysis
The music video featuring Coronel may be framed as a form of gendered empowerment, but ultimately reproduces the age-old gender tropes within organized crime and narco culture more broadly.
From corridos to Netflix series, Escobar to El Chapo, the main narratives of narco culture are most commonly centered around male protagonists, often celebrating a rags to riches story, glamorizing those men’s proclivity to violence and how attractive it makes them to women. The few female narratives we see in similar popular culture vehicles tend to be largely dominated by two main strands: buchonas, or harried victims.
This binary understanding of gender stems from deep-rooted machismo within Mexican society, according to Karina García-Reyes, an academic at the University of West England who specializes in the relationship between masculinity and violence in Sinaloa. “Within this discourse of gender, women have limited identities,” García-Reyes told InSight Crime. “Either as lovers, partners, prostitutes, or mothers.”
While the narco wife figure dates back to the romantic partners of Colombian drug traffickers during the heyday of the Medellín Cartel, Coronel has leaned into the gendered expectations of the role and made it her personal brand.
Around the world, but particularly back home in the city of Culiacán, capital of the state of Sinaloa, Coronel is considered a life guru and fashion icon by many. In 2019, she created a clothing brand with one of her husband’s daughters, and also appeared on the VH1 Cartel Crew reality show. She has used her image to promote various beauty brands and has been interviewed by lifestyle magazine Elle, among others, since her release from prison in 2023.
Thanks to social media, Coronel’s reach goes far beyond Mexico and its criminal underworld. The unrealistic beauty standards promoted by her buchona aesthetic are revered and aggressively promoted on social media, with influencers like Jennifer Ruiz, born in Riverside with no connections to organized crime, having capitalized on the buchona look to gain fame. Attempts by women in Mexico to imitate the look have led to serious injuries and even death from cosmetic surgery complications.
SEE ALSO: What Netflix’s ‘Griselda’ Gets Wrong About Women in Organized Crime
And although Coronel may be the best-known female face of the Sinaloa Cartel, she is far from the most powerful woman to rise up within the organization’s ranks.
Female drug traffickers like Guadalupe Fernández Valencia, alias “La Patrona,” and Luz Irene Fajardo Campos, alias “La Comadre,” “La Madrina,” or “La Doña,” were both convicted in the United States in recent years after working with the Sinaloa Cartel for decades. Both served sentences significantly longer than Coronel.
Fajardo Campos is currently serving a 22-year stint after she was sentenced for running a drug-trafficking operation out of Sinaloa with her two adult sons. Fernández Valencia was the right-hand woman of Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, known as Jesús or “Alfredillo,” one of El Chapo’s sons. She was fundamental in running logistics, money laundering and other key business activities for the Sinaloa Cartel, according to US prosecutors. By the time she was captured in 2016, she had been in the drug business for more than three decades.
But neither of those women, who are decades older than Coronel, seem to command the same fascination as her for today’s chroniclers of organized crime. Nor are they married to the former boss.
On the positive side, change around the visibility of women in the drug trade in contemporary narratives is happening. The recent Netflix series “Griselda” focused on the Miami reign of Colombian queenpin Griselda Blanco. Even if actress Sofia Vergara’s portrayal bore little physical resemblance to Blanco and risked glamorizing the role, producers juxtaposed Blanco’s maternal duties and the misogyny she had to contend with from male rivals in her rise to power with her unflinching violence and ambition.
And even if Coronel’s recent music video appearance portrays a rather limited representation of success that reinforces, rather than challenges, gender stereotypes in organized crime, García-Reyes pointed out that an ability to exploit these stereotypes can also be understood as a form of entrepreneurship in the context of the narco world.
“Women are responding to certain patriarchal stereotypes and playing the hand they have been dealt to their benefit,” García-Reyes said. “There are women who understand how they can play with the tools they have, how they can use the desires that masculinity imposes in their own way.”