Emma Coronel Aispuro, center, leaves Brooklyn federal court, Thursday, Jan. 17, 2019 in New York, after attending the trial of her husband Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. (AP Photo/Kevin Hagen)
NEW YORK (AP) – Lucero Guadalupe Sanchez Lopez was already trapped in an impossible extramarital relationship with Mexican drug lord Joaquin Guzman when she found herself in an even crazier bind – fleeing with Guzman and others from authorities through an underground tunnel, her outlaw love interest in the buff.
Guzman “was naked,” Sanchez said Thursday. “He took off running. He left us behind.”
The account of the mad dash in 2014 and Sanchez’s tortured romance with Guzman while he was on the run came at a U.S. drug trafficking trial that’s detailed his rise and fall as a near-mythical cartel boss. His lawyers say the allegations have been fabricated by cooperators seeking leniency in their own cases.
Sanchez, 29, a former local politician from Guzman’s home state of Sinaloa, took the witness stand in jail smocks after pleading guilty earlier this year to drug charges following her arrest last year. She told her tale with Guzman’s wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, sitting expressionless in the gallery.
The petite and soft-spoken witness said she met Guzman in 2010 and by 2011 was visiting him at his hideouts in Cabo San Lucas and elsewhere, and texting with him on cell phones protected by encryption he gave her. Over time, they began mixing business with pleasure that caused her distress, she said.