Drug Lords Tainting Beauty of Pageants

Girls in Colombia dream of growing up to be queen. They imagine hearing their names being called and walking down the runway to be crowned queen of rice, queen of the sea, queen for a harvest or a day.

“Every girl wants to be queen, even if it’s queen of the house,” quips Angie Melissa Arbelaez, Miss Choco 1997.

“It’s very obsessive here,” says anthropologist Maria Victoria Uribe, Miss Bogota 1968. “There are more beauty contests here. . . . There are millions of queens.”

Within these millions, there is a hierarchy. Being queen of a local festival is not the same as being queen of tourism. The queen of Bambuco, a folk dance, is recognized for having talent as well as beauty.

Further, the lesser contests are often rehearsals--or consolation prizes--for the most royal contest of them all: queen of Cartagena, Miss Colombia. “To have been Miss Colombia is almost like having been president,” says Santiago Medina, who for many years was a member of the committee that selects Miss Bogota.

The Cartagena pageant, known as el reinado, the reign, paralyzes Colombia every November. The army may bomb the Supreme Court--as it did days before the 1985 contest--and presidential candidates may be assassinated--as they were in 1989 and 1990--but the whole country stops to discuss measurements, smiles and gaits.

“The queens are a sort of oasis, an opiate of the masses,” Uribe says.

But in recent years, separating el reinado from Colombia’s national problems has become nearly impossible. This Colombian obsession has become infested with a Colombian woe: drug money.

As the focus has moved from the pageant itself to the scandals surrounding the contest, organizers’ efforts to clean up the pageant have spawned their own controversies, with charges of elitism and invasion of privacy.

The problems stem from narcotics traffickers who sponsor candidates, paying tens of thousands of dollars for the designer clothes, haircuts and training needed to compete in Cartagena. Drug cartels compete against each other to see whose candidate ranks higher in the judging, according to Eccehomo Cetina, author of “Queen in Check,” a book about corruption at the Cartagena pageant.

“It is a symbiotic relationship,” he says. “There are social-climbing women . . . and the desire of drug traffickers to receive recognition.”

The result: embarrassment for pageant organizers and a decline in the prestige of the pageant.

In 1990, Maribel Gutierrez resigned as Miss Colombia to marry Jairo Duran, who is estimated to have invested more than $70,000 in her pageant wardrobe. Federal prosecutors said that Duran, who was killed in 1992, was under investigation at the time of his death for his ties to the Coastal drug cartel.

Gutierrez had worked hard to become Miss Colombia. She had competed in the pageants run by the selection committees of Cesar, Magdalena and Bogota provinces--and lost. She finally got to the competition by representing Atlantico, a province too poor to put on a local competition.

In poor provinces, Cetina says, drug traffickers buy the title for their favorite aspiring queens. Intermediaries persuade the governor to issue a decree naming the woman the province’s representative.

On the night of the Miss Colombia pageant, the computers calculating the scores crashed. Hours later, when the hand-figured scores were revealed, Gutierrez had won.

According to rumors, never proved, two of the five contest judges--all prominent foreigners--had refused Duran’s offer of a bribe. Nevertheless, they believed the death threat he allegedly made against them and kept quiet when the results were announced.

Two years later, when police searched the cell of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar after his escape, they found a photograph signed by Patricia Azcarraga, one of the five finalists in the 1991 pageant. “I am your favorite girlfriend,” she wrote. “Thank you for the trip and all the lovely things you gave me for Cartagena.”

Last year, police found suspected drug lord Justo Pastor Perafan at his hide-out in Venezuela by following his girlfriend, Luz Adriana Ruiz, Miss Vichado 1993.

Such revelations have devastated Colombians, who love their queens the way other countries love their sports teams. Fans say their queens provide them with a needed respite from violence and hostility.

Further, Colombians believe that the scandals have affected their candidates’ performance in the Miss Universe pageant. Colombia has produced no Miss Universe since 1958, although Miss Colombia is often among the five finalists. In fact, Miss Colombia was first runner-up three years in row, from 1992 to 1994.

Medina says that organizers of the Miss Universe pageant have told him bluntly that they fear a drug-money scandal if a Miss Colombia is selected. (Medina has had his own problems with narcotics funds. He has said he accepted millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the Cali cartel as treasurer of President Ernesto Samper’s 1994 campaign.)

In an effort to clean up el reinado, Raimundo Angulo, son of longtime contest organizer Teresa Pizarro de Angulo, has spent the past three years hiring private detectives, supervising provincial selection committees and devising rules that will exclude candidates sponsored by drug traffickers.

Many of the designers and hairdressers most closely associated with the contest have done the same. “Five years ago, I would not have thought that I would ever say this,” notes Alfredo Barraza, who designed wardrobes for nine of the candidates in the November 1997 contest. “I always check things out. The family has to come.”

Uribe, who was known as “the anti-queen” because of her outspoken ideas and such pranks as swimming in the hotel pool after the swimsuit competition, says she is appalled by what the contest has become. “The whole thing seems grotesque to me,” she says. “For women to allow inspections of their past, their ideas, is grotesque.” But organizers argue that they have no other way to keep drug money out.

Taking time for a quick sandwich at a cafe down the street from the pageant offices in Bogota, Raimundo Angulo looks harried.

“We need to take the contest back to what it always was,” he says. The first contestants, more than 50 years ago, were chosen by Colombia’s private clubs. They were from the social elite.

Over the years, more and more contestants have been middle-class and working-class women who saw the pageant as a route to careers in entertainment, modeling or television news. Those contestants are the most susceptible to drug traffickers’ attentions, organizers say.

“Girls from poor families are impressed by their extravagant gifts,” says Liliana Blanco de Lara, who has chaperoned Miss Colombia for seven years. “Girls from high social classes are not tempted because their parents have already given them a car, a driver, a maid, a house and trips all over the world.”

Angulo, who serves without pay as the pageant’s director, is in the process of organizing provincial committees that will select contestants, discreetly screening for young women from respected families. “I am not afraid to say that this is elitist,” he says.

Each province is required to submit its candidate’s name and resume six months in advance to allow time for a background check. And now Angulo is working on containing costs, which drug financing have pushed close to six figures per candidate.

But returning to candidates from privileged families may be more difficult than lowering costs and implementing background checks. The pageant now demands more of the candidates’ time. After months of preparation, candidates who finish in the top five are committed to another year of service, during which they raise an estimated $400,000 for Colombian charities.

“Today’s girls are not interested,” Blanco de Lara says of the young women. “They want to finish their degree and get out of school or start graduate work. They do not want to spend a year being queen.”

Arbelaez acknowledges that although she relished the Cartagena competition, she is eager to get back to her industrial engineering classes next term.

Even women such as Maria Patricia Lopez, who enjoyed her reign as Miss Colombia in 1986, have misgivings about the pageant.

“My father told me that I was going to be queen for a year, not the rest of my life,” she recalls. So, when the year was over, she put on her blue jeans and tennis shoes and went back to college. Her local newspaper ran a front-page editorial criticizing the appearance of the former Miss Colombia.

“It helped me in public speaking,” says Lopez, who is now a product manager at a prominent bank. “After appearing in a bikini in front of 20 million people [on television], nothing scares you.”

But when she is asked whether she would like the baby she is expecting to enter the Miss Colombia pageant, Lopez hesitates.

“Over time, the contest has gone downhill,” she says sadly. “Now another type of person participates. . . . It’s not that I am elitist, but I would not be happy if my daughter were to participate.”