Wife says El Chapo is ‘excellent’ husband

Accused Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is an “excellent father, friend, brother, son and partner,” his young wife said as his landmark trial in New York wound up.

“Everything that has been said in court about Joaquin, the good and the bad, has done nothing to change how I think about him after years of knowing him,” Emma Coronel, 29, said in a message on her Instagram account late Thursday. In his almost three-month-long trial, Guzman, the 69-year-old former head of the Sinaloa drugs cartel known widely as El Chapo, or Shorty, was accused of smuggling hundreds of tons of drugs into the United States over the past quarter-century.

On Monday, the jury starts deliberating on its verdict. If convicted, Guzman is likely to spend the rest of his life in a US jail, having twice escaped from Mexican prisons before being extradited to the United States two years ago.

During the trial, which closed Thursday, Guzman’s former henchmen and colleagues said he had ordered the deaths of dozens of rivals, underlings suspected of being snitches and police officers who refused to take his bribes. Part of the evidence presented by US prosecutors indicates that Coronel was at the very least an accomplice in Guzman’s escape from Mexico’s Altiplano prison in 2015.