Maria Jose Alvarado expected some difficult questions about her country at the Miss World pageant in London, so the 19-year-old beauty queen enlisted a teacher to help her prepare.
They reviewed the history of Honduras, including the coup in 2009 that sent the president into exile. They went through the newspapers to discuss politics and the gang and drug violence that makes this small Central American republic one of the most dangerous countries in the world.
The odds of winning the Miss World crown were long, Alvarado knew, but she practised her English in the weeks leading up to the pageant, just in case she needed an acceptance speech, said Jose Eudaldo Diaz, the philosophy professor who was coaching her.
“She knew that the questions would be about the insecurity and violence because that is what the world knows about Honduras,” Diaz said.
No one ever got to hear Alvarado’s speech, and she did not get to the pageant. She was shot dead with her sister, their bodies discarded on a riverbank. They were laid to rest last week.
The senseless murder of Miss Honduras and her older sister, Sofia, is a family tragedy and a national outrage. While many of the daily dead are gangsters, drug traffickers and police officers, many others are taxi drivers, journalists, abused women and other nameless innocents.
Alvarado would have fallen into the last group were it not for the fact she was unusually beautiful, and rose from humble roots to represent Honduras on a world stage.
Most South American cocaine headed for the US passes through Honduras, and Santa Barbara is on a main corridor from the brutal city of San Pedro Sula to the Guatemalan border.
Officially, the killing of Miss Honduras and her 23-year-old sister is not related to drug trafficking. Police say Sofia’s suitor, Plutarco Ruiz, confessed to shooting the sisters in a jealous rage after she danced with another man at his birthday party. He killed Sofia first and then shot Alvarado twice in the back as she tried to flee.
But to Alvarado’s friends and family, the killings are the result of a traditional machismo made worse by the wealth and muscle of drug traffickers.
Santa Barbara is a Spanish colonial town of one-storey houses with wood posts holding up clay-tiled roofs. Its parents are, for the most part, conservative Roman Catholics who walk their daughters to and from high school in the belief that unaccompanied young women should not be on the streets. Beauty pageants in this region do not allow contestants in bikinis.
The town is surrounded by fog-shrouded mountains and coffee farms, its dirt roads muddied by days of heavy rain. A house once owned by 19th century Honduran president Luis Bogran serves as the private high school and university where Alvarado was enrolled and planned to study international relations. In a covered patio, her friends held a candlelight vigil with a slideshow of pictures from Alvarado’s pageant and modelling career.
Nusly Casana, a classmate of Alvarado’s since kindergarten, described what a tough town Santa Barbara was for women.
“A man is free, a woman not; a man may choose and a woman not. And along with this is the violence that begins at home from childhood and continues throughout life… To call the murder of a woman by a man a crime of passion, to talk of jealousy, is to avoid the daily reality of violence against women,” she said.
The youngest of three sisters, Alvarado began competing in pageants at age 13. She won Miss Northwest Honduras, Miss Teen Honduras and, finally, Miss Honduras, the stepping-stone to the Miss World pageant.
After each competition, she would come back to Santa Barbara and share the details of her experiences with friends, who described her as generous and innocent. She still wore braces on her lower teeth.
“Her successes were our successes,” said Ludin Reyes, another schoolmate.
While Alvarado pursued her dream, and her oldest sister married and moved away, Sofia was not so lucky, friends and officials said. She was a teacher until the school where she worked closed, and in love with a married man who left his wife to be with her, but was murdered last year.
Then Sofia took up with Ruiz. He was known about town as a man to be feared, from a family deeply involved in drug trafficking, officials say. Although he had no police record, he was seen as someone who could offer protection or eliminate enemies.
“This is a drug trafficking corridor,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Ramon Castillo, an army officer in charge of security in Santa Barbara. “David Ruiz, Plutarco’s brother was ‘the bull’ and when he was killed in February, Plutarco took his place. …Plutarco is a violent person with a bad character and he solves everything with a pistol in his hand.”
It is a mystery to Alvarado’s friends why she went with her sister to the riverfront restaurant, that was believed to be a place that Ruiz used to conduct illegal business.
But Alvarado looked up to her big sister and, after baking a cake together, apparently wanted to join Sofia to celebrate Ruiz’s birthday.
Ruiz had six security guards at the November 13 party, Castillo said.
According to police, Sofia and Ruiz got into a heated argument over her dancing with another man. He shot the two women and with the help of a friend buried them by the river.
The next day, Ruiz told Alvarado’s family the women had left the party with someone else, and he invited them for lunch. Later, he even went with them to file a missing persons report with police. But eventually investigators wrested a confession from Ruiz and, nearly a week after they disappeared, he led police to their bodies. Ruiz and three alleged accomplices were arrested.
Alvarado’s mother is left to grapple with the loss of her daughters.
“Poor Sofia,” said the mother, Teresa Munoz.
“I forgive her because she was responsible for what they did to her sister, for the fact that Maria Jose died, too.”
Sapa-AP