Miss Mexico is redesigning her Miss Universe pageant dress -- not because it is too slinky or low-cut, but because it is too violent.
The floor-length dress, belted by bullets and accented by sketches of hangings during Mexico's Roman Catholic uprising in the 1920s, outraged Mexicans who said it was in poor taste and inappropriate for the world's most important beauty contest.
Critics said it glorified violence in a country where a battle between rival drug gangs has brought a wave of killings and beheadings.
PHOTO: AP
Designers who helped select the dress from among 30 entries said they had wanted something that represented the nation's culture and history, especially since Mexico City is hosting the pageant next month.
"We wanted a dress that made you think of Mexico," said Hector Terrones, who served on the selection committee, to the leftist La Jornada newspaper.
But many Mexicans weren't happy about the dress.
Cut from a traditional, natural cotton called manta, the dress depicted scenes from the 1926-1929 Cristero war, an uprising by Roman Catholic rebels against Mexico's secular government, which was imposing fiercely anti-clerical laws. Tens of thousands of people died.
The dress unleashed a storm of criticism. La Jornada carried close-ups of controversial images from the dress, including a man facing a firing squad.
"It's inappropriate to use images of this Cristero war that cost so many lives and was so pointless," said Guadalupe Loaeza, a contemporary Mexican writer.
Miss Mexico, Rosa Maria Ojeda, presented the dress on March 29, showing off the billowing, hoop skirt adorned with sketches of rebels hanging from posts. Rosaries and scapularies hung from her bullet-studded, bandolier belt. She completed the outfit with a huge crucifix necklace, a black halter top and a wide-brimmed sombrero.
The gown's designer, Maria del Rayo Macias, told La Jornada that "we are descendants of Cristeros. Whether we like it or not, it's a part of who we are."
Macias is from Guadalajara, a city in what was the Cristero heartland.
La Jornada columnist Jorge Camil said a dress was not the place to recount the event.
"It would be like Miss USA wearing a dress showing images of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South, with their hoods, their burning crosses and beer cans," he wrote. "A beauty contest is very far from being the right place to vent political and religious ideologies."
Ojeda's representatives released a statement late on Monday stating that the dress would be "modified" due to "the concerns that have surfaced regarding the design."
Pageant spokeswoman Esther Swan said the new skirt will have ribbons and ruffles -- but no images.
Mexican church officials also argued that using the war as a fashion statement was disrespectful to the thousands who died, some of whom were later named saints.
The conflict was the culmination of a century of bloody struggles over liberal attempts to slash the power of the church, which had been an arm of the Spanish colonial government for three centuries, owning vast tracts of land and savagely persecuting rival religions.
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “fish doorbell” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a Web site. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. Now in its fifth year, the
RSS