{"id":7971,"date":"2015-12-22T09:01:23","date_gmt":"2015-12-22T17:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/angry-colombians-look-for-blame-in-mix-up\/"},"modified":"2015-12-22T09:01:23","modified_gmt":"2015-12-22T17:01:23","slug":"angry-colombians-look-for-blame-in-mix-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/angry-colombians-look-for-blame-in-mix-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Angry Colombians look for blame in mix-up"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOGOTA, Colombia<\/strong> \u2014 Colombians celebrated for a little more than two minutes what appeared to be an unprecedented feat for this beauty pageant-obsessed South American nation: back-to-back Miss Universe titles.<\/p>\n

From President Juan Manuel Santos to Miss Colombia\u2019s relatives in the Caribbean port city of Barranquilla, millions of Colombians who tuned in for Sunday\u2019s pageant screamed joyously when it was announced that Ariadna Gutierrez Arevalo had won this year\u2019s crown.<\/p>\n

But the celebrating turned to shouts of fraud seconds later as host Steve Harvey announced on live television from Las Vegas that he had mistakenly read from the cue card. The contestant from the Philippines was the new Miss Universe, not Miss Colombia.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey took away her crown,\u201d and \u201cthe shortest reign in history\u201d was the sentiment expressed almost universally on Twitter, where the hashtag \u201cRespect the Crown\u201d was the country\u2019s top trending topic.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe entire country, and our family, was overcome with emotion,\u201d Alvaro Arevalo, the Colombian runner-up\u2019s cousin, told Blu Radio in an interview Monday. \u201cThe truth is we\u2019re a little shocked.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sudden reversal even caught the president by surprise, forcing him to reverse his initial celebratory tweet.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was watching Miss Universe with my family. We started a huge celebration when they said Colombia had won the Miss Universe title for the second straight year,\u201d Santos told Radio Nacional on Monday.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey put the crown on her head. The photos are there to prove it. To me, as a Colombian, she is still Miss Universe,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Colombians are obsessed with beauty and pageants are a major draw across social classes. But unlike neighboring Venezuela, which has won seven Miss Universe titles, Colombians are accustomed to falling short of the crown, with five runner-up appearances since 1992 including Sunday\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Before last year\u2019s crowning of Paulina Vega, only one other Colombian had won the Miss Universe title, in 1958.<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of Sunday\u2019s shocking finale, Colombians were at a loss to explain the mistake. Newscasts devoted almost 20 minutes to dissecting every detail of the pageant\u2019s confusing end \u2014 from the tweets by a member of the jury celebrating Gutierrez\u2019s win to a front-row audience member\u2019s alleged slipping of a cue card to Harvey \u2014 as reporters looked for clues of what many Colombians believe was a scripted ending to rob their country of its rightful crown and produce higher TV ratings.<\/p>\n

Some journalists blamed Donald Trump, saying they could find no financial record confirming that he had indeed sold the rights to the pageant as he said he did in September.<\/p>\n

Many Colombians were outraged months ago when Trump on the campaign trail accused Mexico of sending rapists and drug traffickers to the U.S. On Sunday, some said they believed the Republican presidential candidate was somehow still pulling the strings to prevent another Latina from being crowned.<\/p>\n

Trump said Monday that he regretted the mixup, adding that it would never have happened under his watch.<\/p>\n

\u201cMafias are everywhere. They stole the title,\u201d said Efrain Salinas, a doorman in a Bogota apartment building. \u201cAfter winning last year\u2019s Miss Universe we\u2019re a beauty pageant powerhouse and nobody wants us to win again.\u201d<\/p>\n

For her part, Gutierrez in her initial remarks seemed saddened but resigned to her fate.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything happens for a reason,\u201d she said, wiping back a tear, in a backstage video posted on the organizer\u2019s website in which she also thanked the judges who voted for her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BOGOTA, Colombia \u2014 Colombians celebrated for a little more than two minutes what appeared to be an unprecedented feat for this beauty pageant-obsessed South American nation: back-to-back Miss Universe titles. From President Juan Manuel Santos to Miss Colombia\u2019s relatives in the Caribbean port city of Barranquilla, millions of Colombians who tuned in for Sunday\u2019s pageant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":7972,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-7971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7971"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=7971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}