Tears and anger poured out for the dark-haired beauty who was to have flown to London on Wednesday to represent Honduras at the Miss World pageant, only to be found shot to death with her sister on a remote river bank.
After the bodies of the reigning Miss Honduras, 19-year-old Maria Jose Alvarado, and her sister Sofia, 23, were discovered early in the day, police announced that the sister’s boyfriend had confessed to killing them last week in a fit of jealousy over his girlfriend dancing with another man.
Dozens of relatives and friends of the beauty queen gathered for a candlelight vigil at the college she attended, remembering a down-to-earth young woman who aspired to be a diplomat, went out without makeup and worked as a model to help support her family.
Photo: EPA
“She was simple, humble, a total innocent smiling and without malice,” said Ludin Reyes, a fellow student at the Technical University of Honduras.
The Center for Women’s Rights, based in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, issued a statement condemning the sisters’ killing and saying that 328 women have been slain in the nation so far this year.
“The case of Maria Jose and Sofia show clearly the situation of generalized violence against women and the nonexistent response of the Honduran government to prevent, investigate or punish it,” the statement said.
The bodies believed to be the sisters’ were found buried near the spa where they disappeared a week earlier while celebrating the birthday of the sister’s boyfriend, Plutarco Ruiz.
At some point during the night of Nov. 13, a heated argument broke out over the sister dancing with another man and Ruiz pulled a gun, firing first at his girlfriend and then at Maria Jose as she tried to flee, National Police director General Ramon Sabillon said. Maria Jose Alvarado was hit twice in the back.
Claudio Cecilio Munoz, an uncle of the sisters, said Ruiz came to the family’s house the day after the young women disappeared to invite them to lunch, and returned several days to help with the search.
He said Ruiz was not a boyfriend, but someone who was courting his niece.
Ruiz led investigators to the gravesite where he and an alleged accomplice buried them in Santa Barbara, about 400km west of Tegucigalpa.
The killing of the sisters highlights what experts call an alarming trend of violence against women in Central America, fueled by poverty, male chauvinism, domestic violence, street gangs and drug trafficking.
According to a report by the UN, slayings of women and girls in Honduras increased 263 percent between 2005 and last year.
The country has the highest homicide rate in the world for a country not at war, with an estimated 90 to 95 killings per 100,000 people.
In September, the center published a report that said that the number of women dying violently rose from 512 in 2011 to 636 last year — even as the number of men killed dropped slightly. The center estimated Honduras’ government underreports slayings of women by as much as 17 percent.
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