Miss Nicaragua Director Charged With ‘Treason to the Motherland’ for Allegedly Rigging Beauty Pageant to Overthrow Government

Miss Nicaragua’s pageant director has been accused of rigging contests to favor anti-government beauty queens as part of a plot to overthrow the government.

Nicaraguan police announced the charges against pageant director Karen Celebertti on Friday.

“The charges against pageant director Karen Celebertti would not be out of place in a vintage James Bond movie with a repressive, closed off government, coup-plotting claims, foreign agents and beauty queens,” the New York Post noted in their report.

On November 18, Nicaragua’s Sheynnis Palacios won the Miss Universe competition.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega called the win a moment of “legitimate joy and pride.”

However, the mood shifted dramatically when it was revealed that the beauty queen was involved in mass anti-government protests in 2018, which she posted photos of on Facebook.

The protests were massive and violent, with 355 people being killed by government forces.

Ortega has said that the protests were an attempted coup with foreign backing against his administration.

In a statement about the charges, the National Police claimed Celebertti “participated actively, on the internet and in the streets in the terrorist actions of a failed coup,” referring to the protests.

The statement continued on to claim that 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.”

Celebertti, her husband, and her son have now been charged with “treason to the motherland.”

The Post reports:

It didn’t help that many ordinary Nicaraguans — who are largely forbidden to protest or carry the national flag in marches — took advantage of the Miss Universe win as a rare opportunity to celebrate in the streets.

Their use of the blue-and-white national flag, as opposed to Ortega’s red-and-black Sandinista banner, further angered the government, who claimed the plotters “would take to the streets again in December, in a repeat of history’s worst chapter of vileness.”

Just five days after Palacio’s win, Vice President and First Lady Rosario Murillo was lashing out at opposition social media sites (many run from exile) that celebrated Palacios’ win as a victory for the opposition.

In a social media post, Murillo wrote, “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.”

Celebertti’s son and husband are reportedly in custody, but Celebertti herself has not been captured.

Palacios has not commented on the situation.