Mexico Has a Beauty Pageant With a Catch: You Can’t Be Pregnant

MEXICO CITY — A beauty pageant at a local fair in rural Mexico came under fire this week when it began advertising for participants, but with some problematic requirements. The contest rules stated that female applicants must be between 17 and 22 years old, single, not pregnant, and never been married or lived with a partner. The winner would receive 10,000 pesos, roughly $500.

The announcement was posted by the official government Facebook page for the municipality of Villa Garcia in the northern state of Zacatecas, where the pageant will take place at their yearly fair, late on Monday night. But it quickly caused outrage on social media. The post has since been removed and it is unclear if the pageant will continue.

Cristela Trejo Ortiz, a lawyer and women's rights activist in the region, told local news outlet El Sol de Zacatecas that “we have direct and indirect human trafficking behind these contests, abuses of all kinds, crimes.”

She said that these kinds of pageants should be banned by authorities because there are “people who obtain direct economic benefits from this business of marketing bodies, thus without names, only as merchandise.”

Rural pageants like these have long been seen as a showcase of sorts of young women for wealthy citizens, politicians, and often people involved in the drug trade. Incarcerated Sinaloa cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán infamously married teenage beauty queen Emma Coronel after seeing her in a local fair's beauty pageant in 2007. He was believed to be around 50-years-old at the time.

Other beauty pageant winners have also gotten caught up in crime themselves. Beauty queen Laura Elena Zuñiga was slated to represent Mexico at the Miss Universe pageant in 2009 until she was arrested months prior along with seven members of a drug cartel, a number of assault weapons and bundles of cash. Zuñiga was later cleared of the charges but her story inspired a popular 2011 movie about a beauty queen involved in organized crime called Miss Bala, or Miss Bullet.

Other beauty queens haven't been as fortunate. A local beauty queen in Sinaloa named María Susana Flores Gámez died in a firefight between soldiers and alleged cartel members in 2012. In February 2021, a former beauty queen from Oaxaca named Laura Mojica Romero was arrested for allegedly being involved in a kidnapping ring.

The beauty pageant industry has also been accused of perpetrating the widespread issue of machismo in Mexico. The country regularly ranks as one of the most dangerous for women in the world. In 2020, 3,723 women were murdered in Mexico alone, according to Amnesty International.