Nicaraguan police are planning to arrest the director of the Miss Nicaragua pageant, whom they accuse of intentionally rigging pageants so that anti-government beauty queens would win the pageants as part of a plot to overthrow the government, she said Friday.
The charges against the pageant director, Karen Celebertti, would not be out of place in an old James Bond film, with a closed and repressive government, allegations of coup plots, foreign agents and beauty queens. It all started on November 18, when Miss Nicaragua, Sheynnis Palacios, won the Miss Universe pageant.
President Daniel Ortega’s government briefly thought it had achieved a rare public relations victory, calling its victory a moment of “legitimate joy and pride.” But the tone quickly soured the day after the victory when it emerged that Palacios had posted photos of herself on Facebook participating in one of the massive anti-government protests of 2018.
The protests were violently repressed and human rights officials reported that 355 people were killed by government forces. Ortega claimed that the protests were an attempted coup d’état with foreign backing, with the aim of overthrowing him. The opposition argued that Nicaraguans were protesting against their increasingly repressive government and its seemingly endless need to cling to power.
According to the National Police statement, 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 apparently escaped from the hands of the police after she was reportedly denied permission to enter the country a few days ago, but some local media reported that her son and her husband had been detained, and her son faces charges of “treason,” without confirmation from the authorities. If so, it would coincide with a strategy that the Ortega regime has previously used to pressure dissidents, as the opposition has repeatedly denounced.
Celebertti “remained in contact with the traitors, and offered to use the franchises, platforms and spaces supposedly used to promote ‘innocent’ beauty pageants, in an orchestrated conspiracy to turn the pageants into political traps and ambushes financed by foreign agents,” according to the police statement.
It didn’t help that many ordinary Nicaraguans, who are largely prohibited from protesting or carrying the national flag in marches, took the Miss Universe victory as a rare opportunity to celebrate in the streets. His use of the blue and white national flag, as opposed to Ortega’s red and black Sandinista flag, further infuriated the government, who claimed that the conspirators would “return to the streets in December, in a repeat of the worst chapter of vileness of the history”.
Just five days after Palacio’s victory, Vice President and First Lady Rosario Murillo lashed out at opposition social media platforms (many of them from exile) that celebrated Palacios’ victory as a victory for the opposition: “In “These days of a new victory, we are seeing evil terrorist commentators making a clumsy and insulting attempt to turn what should be a beautiful and well-deserved moment of pride into a destructive coup,” Murillo said.
The Ortega government, clinging to power since 2007, has a long history of repression behind it: it confiscated and closed the Jesuit University of Central America in Nicaragua, for being the epicenter of the 2018 anti-government protests, along with at least 26 other universities. Nicaraguans. The government also banned or closed more than 3,000 civic groups and non-governmental organizations, arrested and expelled some 200 opponents, stripped their nationality, and confiscated their assets. Thousands have fled into exile.
Palacios, who became the first Nicaraguan to win Miss Universe, has not commented on the situation. During the contest, Palacios, 23, said that she wanted to work to promote mental health after suffering terrible anxiety attacks herself. She also shared her willingness to work to close the gender pay gap. But on a Facebook account in her name that has since been deleted, Palacios posted photos of herself at a protest, where she wrote that she had initially been afraid to participate. “I didn’t know whether to go, I was afraid of what might happen.” Some of those who attended the march that day remember seeing the tall, striking Palacios there.
