In November, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega called the country’s first Miss Universe win a symbol of “legitimate joy and pride.” Weeks later, the crowning of Miss Nicaragua, Sheynnis Palacios, had turned into allegations of treason, purportedly a coup attempt against a regime determined to quash any hint of opposition. How a beauty contest managed to stir up deep feelings of national pride and antagonism against Ortega’s regime reflects a political miscalculation on his part.
There is no question that Ortega faced something more powerful than he is.
Such a turn of events might sound comical to Americans observing from afar, but to Latin Americans who have long seen the Miss Universe pageant as the ultimate expression of cultural and national pride, the panic from Ortega and his allies comes as no surprise. An erstwhile revolutionary, who now refuses to relinquish his power, overplayed his hand. Ortega thought he had to act quickly for his own political survival. That he saw a reinvigorated political opposition in the widespread celebration of national pride in a beauty contest may reflect some degree of narcissism or paranoia on his part — but I believe it says more about the political power that cultural phenomena like the Miss Universe contest hold.
The story starts on Nov. 18, when Palacios was crowned Miss Universe, a historic first for a country not known for winning much on the international stage. The accolade sparked joyous celebrations, the country’s largest public demonstrations since anti-government protests in 2018 led to hundreds of deaths, thousands injured and reports of many being disappeared. National flags flew in full force, a clear repudiation of the Ortega regime, which has largely forbidden public display of the blue-and-white flag in favor of the Sandinistas’ red and black.
Despite claims of being a leftist populist, Ortega’s popularity ranks at about 15%, down from 19% in 2021, when he “won” his fourth term as president. Pope Francis has called the regime a “gross dictatorship,” and a recent Amnesty International report concluded that “human rights defenders, journalists and other activists continued to be harassed and criminalized.”
After Palacios’ win, photos of her participating in those 2018 protests, waving the national flag, surfaced on Facebook. For the Ortega regime, the joy drained immediately from the Miss Universe win. Now it was an attempted coup: “In these days of a new victory, we are seeing the evil, terrorist commentators making a clumsy and insulting attempt to turn what should be a beautiful and well-deserved moment of pride into destructive coup-mongering,” Nicaragua’s first lady and vice president, Rosario Murillo, said on Nov. 22, just three days after Palacios’ win.
At the beginning of December, the Nicaraguan police had planned to arrest Miss Nicaragua pageant director Karen Celebertti for “intentionally rigging contests so that anti-government beauty queens would win the pageants as part of a plot to overthrow the government,” The Associated Press reported.
