Latina Beauty Queens Recruited As Narco Novias

Colombian and Venezuelan beauty queens are being “imported” to Mexico as novias, or girlfriends, for narcos, or drug dealers. This comes from a story by McClatchy, which outlines a handful of cases where these women wound up marrying, bearing children to, managing drug rings for or living with drug dealers in Mexico. McClatchy reported on the following cases:

• Colombiana Julianna Sossa, 25, winner of beauty pageants helped police track down Jorge “El JJ” Balderas Garza by posting to Facebook about where she lived with him. Interpol had been looking for Garza on drug trafficking charges and for shooting Paraguayan soccer player Salvador Cabanas in the head last year.
• Juliana Lopez Aguirre, Colombiana, was the novia of Harold Mauricio “El Conejo” Poveda, who was the intermediary for the Beltran Leyva cartel and the Colombian suppliers.
• Alicia Machado is a Venezuelan woman who won Miss Universe in 1996 was allegedly involved with Gerardo “El Indio” Álvarez Vásquez, a “kingpin,” according to McClatchy. She allegedly had his daughter, but she denied it.
• Angie Sanclemente, 2000 Coffee Queen in Colombia, was married to a drug trafficker called “El Monstruo” and moved to Argentina to manage young women trafficking cocaine to Europe through Mexico.
• Then there was Laura Elena Zúniga, 2008 Miss Sinaloa in Mexico and Miss Hispanic America the same year, who was arrested when it came to light her novio was the head of the Juárez Cartel. She was set free in 2009.

Great reporting by McClatchy on a troubling issue. What do you think about this? Is it sad for women to be trophies to drug lords? Do they get what they deserve for getting involved? Is love really blind?