"En una noche tan linda como ésta"
A corruption scandal within one of the most prestigious, glamorous and demanding beauty pageants in the world has finally seen the light of the mainstream media: Miss Venezuela has been the front of a complex web of prostitution, corruption and money laundering, financed by government oil tycoons and covered up by omertà and hush money.
This is a corruption scandal in which beauty queens, the oil industry, racketeering, drug money and the oldest profession in the world come into a mix that makes Ryan Murphy's hit series "Nip/Tuck" and "American Crime Story" look like a boring, low-rate daytime soap opera.
Today I want to tell you this story.
Miss Venezuela is a beauty pageant.
"Boot camp in Manolo Blahniks"
Perhaps the most demanding, exhausting, and excruciating experience a young woman can endure if she decides to participate in a beauty pageant. Thousands of young women participate in the event and their preliminary rounds, modeling academies have been created around it, and marketing agencies fight tooth and nail over landing a contract to have "La Reina de la Belleza, (the Beauty Queen)" endorse, advertise and promote their products. From fingernail paint, to banking institutions, bread and bakery, shoes, you name it. If it has the Miss Venezuela Organization logo on it, people will buy it. Think of it as the equivalent of Oprah's recommendations.
Miss Venezuela Organization is owned by Cisneros Media Group, an audiovisual media giant that gathers several TV stations in Venezuela and abroad. Cisneros Media is owned by media mogul Gustavo Cisneros a cuban businessman that has very shady deals with the government and has been instrumental to keeping chavismo, the corrupt political movement that has ruled Venezuela with an iron fist for the past twenty years.
Women in Miss Venezuela go through near-starvation diet programs, life-threatening intense exercise programs, several invasive plastic surgeries that encompass breast augmentations, nose-jobs, liposuction, complicated esthetic dentistry, etc. They have to deal with male egos, homosexual hysteria, envy of other women in a highly charged estrogen atmosphere, pressure from sponsors, the media and their families. It's like boot camp on Manolo Blahniks. Competition is fierce and is a dog-eat-dog environment.
Miss Venezuela Organization is considered an institution of Venezuelan pop culture, for over sixty five years it created cultural identification and pride.
This beauty pageant has been held since 1952 to pick the most attractive women in the country to participate in the grand slams of beauty, "the big Four" as it is called in the business: Miss Universe, Miss World, Miss Earth and Miss International.
Many famous (and infamous) women have participated, won and lost and used the pageant as a stepping stone for their professional careers.
The amount of money, dedication and work involved in a production of this magnitude created a multi-million dollar enterprise in the Caribbean nation that hundreds of women like Bárbara Palacios, [Alicia Machado](Maritza Sayalero, Dayana Mendoza, Irene Sáez, Pilin León, Stefania Fernández, Eva Ekvall, and Mónica Spear.
Gorgeous faces, expensive makeup, fancy dresses, shoes. Miss Venezuela became the epitome of femininity in Venezuelan pop culture: Young girls dream of walking down the runway during the "most pretty night", as the catchy jingle goes.
An institution that empowered western women for over half a century is involved in a major prostitution and corruption scandal that involves government oil tycoons, Supreme Court Judges, Governors, a president from Venezuela's Central Bank, Mayors, former Ministers, and the selection committee of the pageant.
Meet Osmel Sousa, "The Tsar of Beauty"
Please allow me to introduce myself,
I'm a man of wealth and taste.
Pleased to meet you,
hope you guess my name
-The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil
Osmel Ricardo Lázaro Valentino Cipriano Sousa Mansilla (b. Cuba, 1946) is the beauty pageant entrepreneur and brains behind the Miss Venezuela Organization since 1981. He is personally responsible for the success of Venezuelan women in beauty pageants.
The world-renowned coach is deemed a genius when it comes to preparing beauty queens and the numbers prove this:
- Seven Miss Universe titles (1979, 1981, 1986, 1996, 2008, 2009, 2013)
- Five Miss World titles (1981, 1984, 1991, 1995, 2011)
- Two Miss Earth titles (2005, 2013)
With the exception of Susana Duijm's Miss World title in 1955, Sousa is credited with being the mastermind behind the selection, preparation and coaching of every Miss Venezuela candidate.
Considered a Queen-Maker, the man that created the success of the Miss Venezuela franchise is now at the center of a corruption and prostitution scandal in one of the most beloved pop culture institutions of the Caribbean nation.
Osmel Sousa is famous, powerful and influential in Venezuelan pop culture, he has diversified and did a lot of work with his personal branding, exerting his power within the Miss Venezuela Organization to grant partnerships, endorsements and advertising to unusual brands not akin to the posh spirit of Miss Venezuela, such as the retailer chain Traki, with whom Sousa has a close friendship to it's owner, Antonio Chambra, whose business associates have ties to state and local chavista authorities.
But what's puzzling you?
It's just the nature of my game
- The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil
But there's a dark side to Mr. Sousa. A side that combines personal greed, ambition and the powerful desire to control. Sousa is widely known as a"control freak", borderline obsessive-compulsive disorder. His pet-peeves, quirks and demeanor would make him a social outcast, but being "El Zar de la Belleza" gives him the perfect excuse to engage in this sort of behavior.
After forty years in charge of Miss Venezuela Organization, Sousa allegedly decided to do a power grab. With his government connections that include the President of the Central Bank of Venezuela, the president of Venezuela's Supreme Court, a cousin of the president of Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., and several other characters. Sousa pretended to create a parallel beauty pageant and acquired the international rights using funds from his "friends and associates" to send the winners of that contest to the "Big Four", thus bypassing Miss Venezuela Organization.
While Sousa was plotting his power grab, he worked at his office at the Miss Venezuela Headquarters normally, but people within Cisneros Media Group soon noticed his intentions and manifested their intention to keep the rights of the international pageant franchise based upon the fact that Miss Venezuela Organization had owned these rights for over four decades.
Cisneros Media Group had grounds for a lawsuit against the parent company of the Miss Universe because of the fact that Sousa was sold the rights to a pageant to which Cisneros Media had owned for a longer time and thus had to rescind the contract signed with Sousa.
Sousa was subsequently fired by the Miss Venezuela Organization amongst rumors of conflicts with the other board members.
Venezuela's economic downturn hits Miss Venezuela, hard.
Osmel's glitter galore was mainly financed by Cisneros Media Group while subsidized dollars were made available by the government. But then came 2013 and Venezuela's finance is on decline, and at the same time, Adriana Cisneros became CEO of Cisneros Media Group and changes in the boardroom of Miss Venezuela Organization took place, a move by the owners undermined Sousa's power within the organization by appointing jurors in the selection committee, a prerogative that was exclusive to Sousa.
Participating in Miss Venezuela is costly, surgeries, make up, dresses, shoes, accessories are payed by the contestants, and many of these young women can't afford it, according to an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, this sort of investment averages 32.000 USD $. An impossible amount of money in a country where the average monthly pay is under 100$.
The "Sponsors"
The following audio is an invitation made by Pablo Escobar to a group of ladies, inviting them courteously to his ranch to spend a weekend, all expenses paid. If the invited ladies decline the invitation, he threatens them with killing their family.
This perverse gangster style behavior of forcing young women into sexual escapades isn't new, sexual exploitation remains a blight upon western women, in a world where unlimited power, drugs and corruption lead to a decay in moral values, society transforms itself in the worst aspects possible.
When combining economic decline, lack of money, and willing contestants, the figure of sponsorship appears, this has taken place since Miss Venezuela has appeared, designers lend gowns, make up artists do their work, and stylists do their work to get recognized and help the participating women. This is the good aspect of sponsorship for aspiring Miss Venezuela candidates, but the perversity of evil men and women transformed sponsorship into a high class prostitution ring.
Candidates were pressured by Osmel Sousa and his staff into accepting gifts and meetings with several high ranking officers within the chavista administration.
A quite entangling and sordid cast of characters which funneled public funds to provide clothing, accessories, make-up, surgeries and the likes to potential candidates and buy their way up into the ranks of the pageant, testimonies from several former participants that turned to social networks such as Twitter and Instagram to publish their accounts of the corruption they witnessed within the Miss Venezuela Organization.
The decline of moral values that chavismo brought upon Venezuela affected the Miss Venezuela pageant in a very disturbing way and Osmel Sousa and his associates were the articulators for these events, some go ahead and blame women for acquiescing into prostitution in search for fame and glory, but very few people take into consideration the fact that government officials funneled great amounts of public money that could have been used to feed, cure and educate Venezuelans. This racket is not just nickel-and-dime stuff. It goes all the way to the Public Bank of Andorra corruption probe where billions of dollars were laundered.
Miss Venezuela is considered an institution within the Venezuelan pop culture, and whether or not you're into runways with pretty girls in towering stilettos, this beauty pageant brought many good and bad things to Venezuelan society, we felt great joy for the success of great women like Maite Delgado, Bárbara Palacios, Maritza Sayalero, Susana Duijm, Pilín León and Mónica Spear, and we feel shame for women involved in this scandal such as Annarella Bono, Deborah Menicucci, Ana Ugarte and Claudia Suárez.
The Miss Venezuela Organization was a Harvard Case Study and corruption tainted it with the work of drug dealers, pimps and corrupt officials that casted a shadow into it by destroying women and turning them into sex dolls.
This is a sad, disturbing case that only proves how much of a historic accident chavismo is and the irreparable damage that it dealt upon Venezuelan society. It pains me having to write this, but people need to know the realities of what is going on in my country.
Venezuela needs your help. And knowing these sorts of things is part of the solution.
thank you for reading
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Que viva Venezuela!
