/ Updated By Daniela Franco 
 
 The wife of Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán, Emma Coronel Aispuro, said in her first-ever interview that she fears for the life of her husband and has not seen him since he was recaptured on January 8. 
 
 The exclusive Telemundo interview between Coronel Aispuro and Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández aired on Sunday, in a news special titled “The Queen of El Chapo.” 
 
 Coronel Aispuro is a former beauty queen who was born in California and holds dual citizenship. El Chapo reportedly met her in 2006, when he was around 50 years old and she was 17. They married in 2007 on her 18th birthday. 
 
 Coronel Aispuro questioned the conditions her husband is living in at the Antiplano prison, claiming the Mexican government is responsible for El Chapo's health. 
 
 A Telemundo promotional photo for its interview with Emma Coronel Aispuro. Telemundo News 
 
 “I fear for his life [El Chapo’s]. We don’t know if he is eating well. We don’t know what his situation is because we haven’t seen him,” she said. 
 
 Telemundo Video: La Esposa del Chapo Habla Por Primera Vez En Exclusiva 
 
 “They want to make him pay for his escape. They say that they are not punishing him. Of course they are. They are there with him, watching him in his cell,” she said in the interview, which was produced in association with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley (IRP). 
 
 “Not everything people say is true... I think that all human beings have the right to have at least the basic things — they are not giving that to him,” she said. 
 
 A Telemundo promotional photo for its interview with Emma Coronel Aispuro. Telemundo News 
 
 Coronel Aispuro also spoke about Kate del Castillo and her relationship with El Chapo, as well as about her family life and El Chapo's relationship with his twin daughters. 
 
 Related Article: El Chapo's Wife Gives Birth in California Hospital 
 
 On Friday, journalist Anabel Hernández appeared on Telemundo's "Al Rojo Vivo con María Celeste" to talk about the Telemundo News exclusive. She revealed that the interview took place February 12th in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico. 
 
 "This is an interview that I have been going after for a very long time; I’ve been investigating the life of 'El Chapo' for 15 years,” she told host María Celeste Arrarás. "Emma [Coronel Aispuro] thanked me for the interview but I also thanked her because this is an interview to understand the circumstances around this whole ordeal." 
 
 Hernández says that Coronel Aispuro willingly answered all the questions she had. "I asked her what she says to people that consider that 'El Chapo' Guzmán is a dangerous criminal, and she says that to her, Joaquín Guzmán is just her husband, not 'El Chapo'," she said. 
 
 Follow NBC News Latino on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. ||||| Image copyright Reuters Image caption Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is being held in a maximum security prison in New York 
 
 Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman has complained in court about his conditions of custody in a US jail. 
 
 Guzman is being held in a maximum security prison in New York after he was extradited last month. 
 
 The notorious kingpin escaped twice from prison in Mexico, once in a laundry basket and most recently through a tunnel in his cell. 
 
 His lawyers say he has been denied marital visits and is largely kept in solitary confinement. 
 
 The claims arose at a federal court in Brooklyn at a hearing for Guzman, who has pleaded not guilty to charges that he ran the world's largest drug-trafficking organisation during a decades-long career. 
 
 He faces life in prison if convicted. 
 
 Guzman's wife Emma Coronel, a 27-year-old former beauty queen and mother of his twins, flew from Mexico to attend the hearing. 
 
 His lawyers said it was first time Ms Coronel had seen her husband since his surprise extradition two weeks ago. 
 
 Image copyright AFP/Getty images Image caption Guzman's wife Emma Coronel (L) and lawyer Michelle Gelernt outside the Brooklyn courthouse 
 
 Guzman, 59, is reportedly on 23-hour lockdown in a special unit of the Manhattan Correctional Center. 
 
 "We understand the need for security but we think it has gone above and beyond," said Michelle Gelernt, one of his court-appointed lawyers. 
 
 District Judge Brian Cogan pointed out that the "history of the defendant is somewhat unusual" - a reference to his past escapes - and said the Federal Bureau of Prisons should decide what conditions Guzman faced and who he could see. 
 
 Guzman's Sinaloa cartel allegedly smuggled hundreds of tonnes of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines to the US while waging war with other gangs. 
 
 The cartel is accused of carrying out thousands of murders and kidnappings, and bribing officials. 
 
 Guzman - widely known by his nickname El Chapo, which means "Shorty" - is believed to have amassed a billion-dollar fortune through the drugs trade. 
 
 Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto had initially resisted extraditing him to the US, insisting that he should face justice at home. 
 
 But after Guzman was recaptured in January 2016, Pena Nieto changed his mind on extradition and ordered officials to speed up the process. ||||| This is an excerpt from Univision's 2013 documentary titled "El Chapo Guzman: The Eternal Fugitive." (Univision) 
 
 Escape artist and drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán made two furtive visits to the United States last year while he was on the lam, his daughter has told the Guardian in an exclusive interview. 
 
 Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz, 39, a U.S. citizen, said her father sneaked into California to visit her in late 2015 at the large, five-bedroom home he purchased for her and her four children, the location of which was not disclosed. According to the Guardian, Guzmán Ortiz owns a chain of small businesses, but she insisted that any money she received from her father was clean. 
 
 Asked how her father managed to cross the heavily patrolled U.S. border with Mexico — whose alleged porousness has become a major theme of leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — Guzmán Ortiz declined to answer. “I asked him the same, believe me,” she said. 
 
 Jacqueline Wasiluk, a Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman, said Friday the agency has “no information that substantiates the claims in news reports” about Guzmán. 
 
 Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel has engineered dozens of smuggling tunnels under the U.S. border over the past decade or more, but those are only the ones authorities know about. It wouldn’t have been difficult for Guzmán to zip into California through one of the passageways, many of which have sophisticated ventilation systems and customized shuttle carts for moving drugs, guns, cash and people back and forth. 
 
 Guzmán was recaptured by Mexican navy commandos in January and is being held at the same maximum security prison he escaped from last July using an elaborate mile-long tunnel leading straight up to his shower drain. 
 
 What Guzmán Ortiz told the Guardian is what millions of skeptical Mexicans already believe: The government let him out. “My dad’s escape was an agreement,” she said in the interview. 
 
 At least 34 people have been charged with facilitating the escape, including the head of Mexico’s federal prison system. 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz’s statements, and those of other Guzmán surrogates in recent weeks, appear to be part of a concerted public relations campaign, with his wife, attorneys and now his daughter all giving detailed interviews reportedly at Guzmán’s behest. 
 
 “My dad is not a criminal. The government is guilty,” Guzmán Ortiz told the Guardian. She claimed that her father has financed the election campaigns of high-ranking Mexican politicians who have since betrayed him. 
 
 She said her father was also double-crossed by longtime trafficking partner Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the man now believed to be at the helm of the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico’s most powerful drug organization. 
 
 It was the first interview Guzmán’s daughter has given. The Guardian said it confirmed her identity with several documents and with an evangelical pastor in the rural community of Badiraguato in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, where Guzmán grew up dirt-poor and hungry. 
 
 Through his lawyers and his wife, Emma Coronel, a former beauty queen, Guzmán has recently alleged mistreatment by prison authorities, claiming that they frequently disturb his sleep. 
 
 Coronel, a dual U.S.-Mexican citizen in her mid-20s who gave birth to Guzmán’s twin daughters in California in 2011, told Telemundo that the treatment amounts to “torture” and that she fears for her husband’s life. 
 
 On Wednesday, Guzmán’s attorney, José Refugio Rodriguez, told reporters that the wake-ups have become so intolerable that his client is willing to drop legal challenges to his extradition to the United States and plead guilty, provided he is allowed to serve at a medium-security U.S. prison. U.S. officials have not commented on the offer. 
 
 But the proposal also looks like a shot across the bow for Mexican authorities who may have ties to Guzmán and the Sinaloa cartel, as his daughter and others allege. 
 
 Guzmán, 61, or maybe 58 — his birth date is also still a mystery — has been in the drug trade nearly all of his life, and he is believed to possess damning information about two generations of Mexican politicians and security officials. 
 
 On U.S. soil, there would be little to prevent him from sharing it with the Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. law enforcement as part of a deal for less-harsh prison conditions. 
 
 Though she did not say, Guzmán Ortiz’s statements also raise the possibility that her father spent time in the United States prior to his previous arrest in 2014. He was also captured in Guatemala in 1993 but broke out of another maximum-security prison in 2001 by hiding in a laundry cart, as the legend goes. 
 
 Asked in 2011 where Guzmán might be hiding, then-president Felipe Calderón said in an interview with the New York Times that the drug lord wasn’t hiding in Mexico. “I suppose he’s in the United States,” he said. “How many families and drug bosses would be more comfortable on the northern side of the border instead of the southern side?”
– It's no surprise that Mexico is keeping a very close eye on drug lord Joaquin Guzman after recapturing him for the second time—but that doesn't mean his wife has to like it. In her first public comments about "El Chapo," beauty queen Emma Coronel says she fears he may not survive the "slow torture" of solitary confinement at El Altiplano, the prison he left through a mile-long tunnel last year. "They want to make him pay for his escape. They say that they are not punishing him. Of course they are. They are there with him, watching him in his cell," Coronel says, per the Los Angeles Times. "They don't let him sleep. He has no privacy, not even to go to the restroom." The Telemundo interview with Coronel was recorded in Mexico in mid-February and aired Sunday night, NBC News reports. Coronel—who married Guzman on her 18th birthday eight years ago, when he was 50—has dual American-Mexican citizenship and gave birth to his twin girls in California in 2011. He is believed to have at least 17 other children. Coronel says she only saw her husband twice during his months as a fugitive last year. "He just wanted to have a nice time with his daughters," she says. "To be in peace." She claims to know little of Guzman's drug empire and says she has never seen him use drugs or violence. "He is like any other man—of course he is not violent, not rude," she says. "I have never heard him say a bad word. I have never seen him get excited or be upset at anyone." (When authorities closed in, Guzman temporarily escaped through a door hidden behind a mirror.)