Police Accuse Director of Miss Nicaragua Pageant of Rigging Contest in Coup Plot

Nicaraguan police claim that the director of the Miss Nicaragua pageant intentionally rigged the contest so that an anti-government beauty queen would win as part of a plot to overthrow the country's current regime.

A statement by the National Police on Friday claimed that Karen Celebertti "participated actively, on the internet and in the streets in the terrorist actions of a failed coup."

She allegedly "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.

Celebertti, her husband and son face charges of "treason to the motherland," the Associated Press reports. Police are seeking Celebertti's arrest, and some local media report that her husband and son have already been taken into custody.

The charges come two weeks after this year's Miss Nicaragua, Sheynnis Palacios, won the 72nd annual Miss Universe pageant in San Salvador – the first time a Nicaraguan has ever won the competition.

While Nicaragua's president, Daniel Ortega, initially said that the win brought "legitimate joy and pride," things changed after the discovery that the 23-year-old beauty queen took part in the mass protests against Ortega's increasingly authoritarian government in 2018.

In since-deleted Facebook account, Palacios posted photos of herself at a protest. "I didn't know whether to go, I was afraid of what might happen," she wrote on social media.

Ortega claimed that the demonstrations were an attempted coup with foreign backing. They were violently repressed, and human rights officials say that 355 people were killed by government forces.

Although Palacios herself has yet to comment, her victory has been praised by critics of Ortega's Sandinista party. Crowds took to the streets in celebration, flying the blue-and-white national flag that has been banned since 2018, leading the government to crack down.

"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," said Nicaraguan Vice President and First Lady Rosario Murillo.