[imagesource:gencraft]

Authoritarian president, Daniel Ortega, and the Nicaraguan government have accused the director of the Miss Nicaragua beauty pageant of wanting to overthrow the oppressive regime by ‘fixing the competition to favour anti-Ortega beauty queens’.

Nicaraguan police announced last week that they want to arrest pageant direct Karen Celebertti, less than two weeks after Nicaraguan beauty queen Sheynnis Palacios won the Miss Universe competition.

As paranoid and stupid as this may sound to most people, it’s not outside the realm of possibility for a government headed by the oppressive 78-year-old Daniel Ortega, who seems to be intent on turning the beautiful country into his own fiefdom.

The former revolutionary icon once helped liberate the country from a dictator, only to now become one himself. Sounds familiar.

Photos of the newly crowned Miss Universe circulated widely online and showed Palacios wearing a blue-and-white cape during the pageant, which many believed was a nod to the old national flag banned in 2018. Ortega embarked on a colour change after taking over the reins and now only uses a red-and-black banner as his preferred national symbol.

Screeching from her husband’s red and black coattails, First Lady Rosario Murillo read from the revolutionary-turned-oppressor handbook and claimed “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.”

It would appear as if the entitled leaders are the ones to crap all over a beautiful moment, not the ‘evil terrorists’ threatening their authority with a tiara. The national police were quick to blame the pageant director in a statement, claiming that Celebertti was also involved in the 2018 protests, which they called “the terrorist actions of a failed coup”.

“(Celebertti) remained in contact with the traitors, and offered to employ the franchises, platforms and spaces supposedly used to promote ‘innocent’ beauty pageants, in a conspiracy orchestrated to convert the contests into traps and political ambushes financed by foreign agents.”

The president is of course well equipped to deal with terrorists and other dissidents, including everyone from activists to members of the church, who have led protests in the country for years. In 2018, an ‘uprising’ was violently dealt with by government forces, leading to over 300 people being killed.

Celebertti is currently outside of Nicaragua and will likely stay away to avoid ‘re-education’.

Apparently in Nicaragua, the devil wears a tiara.

[source:vice]