In the midst of a corruption and prostitution scandal, the board of Cisneros Media Group decided to close Miss Venezuela Organization's doors and restructure the brand. After firing Osmel Sousa and doing a very expensive PR campaign to wash their reputation, the disturbing echoes of past wrongdoings still cast a shadow on the Venezuelan pop culture institution.
Cartoon made by the author
This is a follow up on this post.
There's something very dark behind that glamour filled runway. A dark web of corruption and high-end prostitution that begins with Miss Venezuela's former head honcho Osmel Sousa and stretched all the way into the heights of chavismo's hierarchy, involving direct relatives of oil execs, governors, mayors, bankers, central bank governors and supreme court magistrates.
Color me your color, baby
Color me your car
Color me your color, darling
I know who you are
Come up off your color chart
I know where you're comin' from
-Blondie, "Call me"
Participation in the world's most demanding beauty pageant is extremely costly, in a country where the yearly minimum salary lies at twenty bucks makes the girls that want to get a shot at the runway go at great lengths in the search of economic help to pay for the expenses.
If you mix a young, pretty, aspiring woman, in economic need, and you throw in the male chavista penchant for trophy wives and the corruption that chavismo entails with millions of dollars you get the perfect mix of circumstances for ill-intentioned folk to infiltrate and corrupt a prestigious organization to turn it into a high class prostitution agency.
Meet Diego Salazar a.k.a. "The Cousin"
Photo taken from Poderopedia
Diego Salazar is the son of a former communist guerrilla leader. A low rent insurance salesman that quickly rose to become one of the biggest business tycoons in Venezuela thanks to the help of his cousin former Petróleos de Venezuela's (PDVSA) president Rafael Ramírez Carreño.
Both Salazar and Ramírez fell from grace with chavismo after they were indicted in december 2017 with corruption charges and racketeering within PDVSA's ranks. This was a PR move by chavismo in their attempts for some sort of transparency and struggle against corruption, for rather than being a real investigation, it's a purge, a sham-corruption probe led by another corrupt individual, the steroid ridden-illegally appointed-Attorney General Tarek William Saab.
Salazar is under custody at the Venezuelan Secret Police HQ and Ramírez's whereabouts are unknown.
Salazar started big, and then he went huge: He was able to get hold of juicy no-bid insurance contracts for PDVSA provided by his generous cousin, then he stretched his commercial relationship with the state company his cousin was handling as it were his own, so he landed some multi-million "consulting fees" in order to produce contracts in Venezuela with infrastructure companies in China.
With that giant amount of money flowing into his bank account and no way to prove that this origin was legit, Salazar decided to launder money in any way he could so he chose the Miss Venezuela Organization to do so.
Lights is blinding, girls need blinders
So they can step out of bounds quick, the sidelines is
Lined with casualties, who sip to life casually
Then gradually become worse, don't bite the apple, Eve
Caught up in the in-crowd, now you're in style
End of the winter gets cold, en vogue, with your skin out
City of sin, it's a pity on the whim
Good girls gone bad, the city's filled with them - Jay Z, "Empire State of mind"
Salazar had a penchant for luxury. In 2012 his wine cellar was stacked from top to bottom with 694 bottles of 1990 Pomerol Petrus, 5560€ a bottle. And if you think spending half a million dollars isn't flashy enough, then in the aforementioned link you can also look at his caviar tab.
Photo by El País
With fancy wines, fine art, apartments and construction companies, Salazar provided the perfect cover for his real business: Stealing money from a state oil company. Chavismo never knew how to handle itself amongst wealthy people, since they made their way to the top by wrongdoing they always think that the only way to fit into the high society was to buy their way in, so the high-brow elite of Venezuela never really cared for them, but other money-hungry, power-grabbing, immoral corrupt fiends such as Osmel Sousa, that wasn't much of a problem.
For Osmel Sousa, having people like Salazar and his kind around was a personal guarantee of having a steady cash income to provide him with the lifestyle he enjoyed for the many decades Cisneros Media Group was paying his bills, but when Venezuela's economy turned bitter, he needed to "diversify" his portfolio.
The idea of sponsoring the surgeries, and wardrobe of many young pretty contestants was always a thing within Miss Venezuela, designers would lend gowns, hairdressers would work pro-bono and even the neighbors would chip in and make fundraises for a local aspiring girl to cost their expenses at such demanding and competitive environment. That's the nice aspect of sponsorship. But when corruption and immorality get together to prey on institutions, not even Miss Venezuela can get away from it.
Salazar and his luxurious lifestyle soon made him get acquainted with Gisselle Reyes, Miss Venezuela's runway coach and one of Osmel's right hands. With her help, Salazar met Claudia Suárez, a beauty queen from 2006 with whom he funneled his ill-gotten monies to the Public Bank of Andorra.
It is estimated that Salazar and his associates in a period of ten years funneled nearly three billion US dollars to Andorra. That's more than twice the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program so let that sink in.
Salazar had an elegant M.O.: According to investigative journalist Patricia Poleo, Gisselle Reyes and Osmel Sousa would draft a catalogue of girls that had the looks but not the monies to pay for their runway expenses, so they showed to Salazar and his acquaintances. Osmel and Giselle then approached the contestant with a Rolex, (like the hundreds Salazar purchased) and told the girls that a potential sponsor wanted to have a business lunch, or a dinner with them, in private.
In silence they scream
How needless they suffer
Dying for the freedom
But someone has to pay
No one hears their agony
The torture and abuse
Simple human dignity
Is lost in the fuse Front Line Assembly - Modus Operandi
It was up to the girl to choose whether or not she accepted the sordid rendezvous, but greed, personal aspirations and cajoling from the committee would make the girl accept the proposal.
If a girl accepted, she would be "sponsored". That meant she'd get all that she wanted, surgeries, coaching lessons, shoes, make-up, personal trainer, a personal dentist, and lots of PR.
In exchange she'd had to do a series of things: Have sexual intercourse with her sponsor, usually a married man with links to Salazar, or participate as the PR image of Salazar's father's heritage foundation, to become hostesses to Salazar's luncheons for foreign clients, or lobbyists to his corrupt cause.
If a girl denied that indecent proposal she would be likely out of the competition and threatened in the same way that Pablo Escobar did to models back in the eighties. This potential threat for harm meant a dead-end for the contestant, so sometimes they have had to reluctantly accept this sort of thing. This very fact, according to some writers and journalists opinion shuts down a lot of the criticism of the moral character of a participant in the beauty pageant that accepted to become a high end prostitute.
One must understand the concept coined by Hannah Arendt when she wrote about the "banality of evil" to tell the difference between Arendt's book and the sordid cast of beauty queens pointing at each other and calling out names, which is how this scandal got picked up by the showbiz press.
Most of the instagram posts have been deleted but what one former Miss Anzoátegui and now morning anchor of a show in a national network whose marriage to one of Chavez's aides (the banking Superintendent) went to shambles after she caught him cheating with the sister of another beauty queen said turned her into a whistleblower with a severe conflict of interests.
The list of beauty queens that have done work for Salazar's foundation is wide, and it encompasses nearly a decade of the sixty-six year long beauty competition: Alicia Dolanyi, Ányela Galante, Ana Ugarte, Lesly Barrera, Keisi Sayago, Zoraya Villarreal, and the back-to-back Miss Universe winners Stefanía Fernández and Dayana Mendoza are involved in public appearances linked to Salazar's businesses. Whether or not these women delved into other crimes is up for grabs. However, given the gangster-like nature of this racket it is not unlikely that crimes by omission, action, work or word have been committed.
One thing that the Miss Venezuela scandal shows is the communist hypocrisy of decrying that wealth and luxury is vicious -Hugo Chávez dixit- while sporting a 125.000$ USD Malte Tourbillon Vacheron Constatin watch.
Salazar, along with Osmel Sousa were instrumental to the corruption and decay of a Venezuelan pop culture institution, and it's only a small glimpse of the corruption money that Salazar along with his cousin and his cronies brought upon Venezuela by the hands of murderous chavista regime, that turns into decay everything that it touches.
The Miss Venezuela scandal is only a part of it, in the following post, which I will be writing this week I will explain how the scandal broke out. It's a complex issue, deserving a post on its own.
Venezuela is an exhuberant, rich, violent and decadent nation being held hostage by the criminal international regime that is Chavismo. As a fervent opposer to this criminal gang, I write these kinds of posts to let people know what is going on my country from a citizen's point of view. It pains me to see this sort of thing happening in my country, and only through reaching out to everybody around the planet do Venezuelans get people to actually know the truth of a criminal gang that has bankrupted the nation with the largest oil reserves in the planet, causing massive hyperinflation, the world's highest murder rate and the worst humanitarian crisis that the country has ever seen in its history.
Photo by Pixabay
People like Salazar, Ramírez and his folk need to be put in trial and punished for the suffering that they have caused to millions of Venezuelans.
The world needs to understand that chavismo isn't just a domestic threat, it is an international threat for it is linked for financing world wide terrorism such as the narcoterrorist guerrilla of FARC in Colombia, the iranian proxy Hezbollah, Spanish terrorist band ETA, among others as well as exerting continental influence in putting into power left-wing corrupt governments such as Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, the Kirchners in Argentina, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, etc.
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Thank you for reading.
Que viva Venezuela
