Police charge director of Miss Nicaragua pageant with running ‘beauty queen coup’ plot

By GABRIELA SELSER
Associated Press

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Nicaraguan police say they want to arrest the director of the Miss Nicaragua pageant, accusing her of intentionally rigging contests so that anti-government beauty queens would win the pageants as part of a plot to overthrow the government. 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.. Miss Nicaragua, Nicaragua’s Sheynnis Palacios, won the Miss Universe competition on Nov. 18. But the next day it emerged that Palacios had posted photos of herself on Facebook  participating in one of the mass anti-government protests in 2018.