Nicaraguan police said Friday they want to arrest the director of the Miss Nicaragua pageant, accusing her of intentionally rigging the pageants so that anti-government beauty queens would win the contests as part of a plot to overthrow the government.
The accusations against pageant director Karen Celebertti would not be out of place in a vintage James Bond film with a repressive, closed government, conspiracy allegations, foreign agents and beauty queens.
It all started on November 18, when Miss Nicaragua, Nicaraguan Sheynnis Palacios, won the Miss Universe pageant.
President Daniel Ortega’s government briefly believed it had scored a rare public relations victory, calling the victory a moment of “legitimate joy and pride.”
But the tone quickly deteriorated the day after the victory when it emerged that Palacios had posted photos of herself on Facebook participating in one of the mass anti-government protests in 2018.
The protests were violently repressed and human rights officials say 355 people were killed by government forces.
Ortega claimed the protests were an attempted coup with foreign support, aimed at his overthrow. His opponents said Nicaraguans were protesting his increasingly repressive regime and seemingly relentless desire to stay in power.
A national police statement said Celebertti “actively participated, on the internet and in the streets, in the terrorist actions of a failed coup,” an apparent reference to the 2018 protests.
Celebertti reportedly escaped police after being denied permission to enter the country a few days ago.
But some local media reported that her son and husband had been taken into custody.
Celebertti, her husband and her son are accused of “betrayal of the country”. They have not spoken publicly about the accusations against them.
Celebertti “stayed in contact with the traitors and offered to use the franchises, platforms and spaces allegedly used to promote “innocent” beauty pageants, in an orchestrated conspiracy to turn the pageants into traps and politically funded ambushes by foreign agents,” according to the statement.
It didn’t help that many ordinary Nicaraguans – who are largely barred from protesting or carrying the national flag at demonstrations – used Miss Universe’s victory as a rare opportunity to celebrate in the streets. .
Their use of the blue and white national flag, as opposed to Ortega’s red and black Sandinista banner, further angered the government, which claimed that the conspirators would “take to the streets again in December, in a repeat of the worst chapter of history. of baseness. »
Just five days after Palacio’s victory, Vice President and First Lady Rosario Murillo lashed out at opposition social media sites (many of them gone into exile) that were celebrating Palacios’ victory as a victory for the opposition.
“In these days of new victory, we see clumsy terrorist commentators attempting, in clumsy and insulting ways, to turn what should be a magnificent and well-deserved moment of pride into a destructive coup campaign,” Murillo said.
Ortega’s government seized and closed the Jesuit University of Central America in Nicaragua, which was a hub of the 2018 protests against the Ortega regime, alongside at least 26 other Nicaraguan universities.
The government also banned or closed more than 3,000 civic groups and nongovernmental organizations, arrested and deported opponents, stripped them of their citizenship, and confiscated their property.
Thousands of people fled into exile.
Palacios, who became the first Nicaraguan to win Miss Universe, has not commented on the situation.
During the competition, Palacios, 23, said she wanted to work to promote mental health after suffering from debilitating anxiety attacks herself. She also said she wants to work to reduce the gender pay gap.
But on a deleted Facebook account under her name, Palacios posted photos of herself at a protest, writing that she had initially been afraid to participate. “I didn’t know if I should go, I was afraid of what might happen.”
Some who attended the march that day remember seeing the large, striking Palacios there.