On 18 November 2023, Sheynnis Alondra Palacios Cornejo stood on stage at the Gimnasio Nacional José Adolfo Pineda in San Salvador, wearing a crystal-embellished blue-and-white gown, and became the first Nicaraguan to win Miss Universe. The moment lasted seconds. The consequences have lasted years.
Within 48 hours, photographs surfaced of Palacios participating in the 2018 anti-government protests in Nicaragua – demonstrations in which, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 355 people were killed by state security forces. The images, which Palacios had posted to her own Facebook before deleting them, transformed a beauty pageant victory into a geopolitical crisis overnight. The Ortega regime initially praised her triumph as a moment of “legitimate joy and pride”. Then Vice President Rosario Murillo publicly denounced what she called “evil, terrorist commentators making a clumsy and insulting attempt to turn what should be a beautiful and well-deserved moment of pride into destructive coup-mongering”.
What followed was not merely political theatre. It was a systematic dismantling of everyone connected to Palacios’s path to the crown.
The Diriamba Girl Who Sold Buñuelos to Fund Her Degree
To understand why a beauty pageant mattered so profoundly in Managua, one must understand where Palacios came from. Born on 30 May 2000 at Hospital Alemán Nicaragüense in Managua, she grew up in Diriamba, a town in Carazo Department known for traditional dances and pottery. Her parents, Raquel Cornejo Pichardo and Édgar Arístides Palacios García, raised her in modest circumstances. To fund her studies at the Universidad Centroamericana – a Jesuit institution founded in 1961 as the first private university in Central America – Palacios made and sold buñuelos with her mother and maternal grandmother. She was reportedly bullied at school for the work.
She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mass communication in 2022, having played on the university volleyball team. Prior to Miss Universe, Palacios worked as a model, television presenter, and journalist, hosting Entiende tu mente (Understand Your Mind) on Channel 11, a programme about mental health rooted in her own experience with anxiety attacks. “I’m here to say it’s possible… people don’t know they have the right to address their mental health,” she stated during her reign, as reported by Despacho 505.
Her pageant career stretched back to 2016, when she won Miss Teen Nicaragua at 16, subsequently competing at Teen Universe 2017 where she reached the top six. After a hiatus, she returned in 2020 to claim the Miss World Nicaragua crown, competing at Miss World 2021 in Puerto Rico, where she reached the top 40 before the competition was disrupted by a COVID-19 outbreak. By the time she won Miss Nicaragua in August 2023, she had been building towards this moment for seven years.
The Gown That Sparked a Crackdown
Palacios’s crowning gown – a crystal-embellished dress in blue and white – was interpreted on multiple levels. The colours matched those of both the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran flags, but observers quickly noted that blue and white had been adopted by the Nicaraguan opposition as a symbol of resistance against the Ortega regime. The colours appeared prominently during the 2018–2022 protests. According to The Guardian, the gown’s styling also drew comparisons to depictions of the Virgin Mary – a layer of symbolism that resonated deeply in a predominantly Catholic country.
The visual symbolism was compounded by the streets. Upon learning of Palacios’s victory, thousands of Nicaraguans took to the streets of Managua and other cities – described as the first such gathering since the mass protests were suppressed. Citizens waved blue-and-white national flags rather than the red-and-black Sandinista banner, an act the government treated as deliberate provocation. In a country where public demonstrations have been banned since 2018, the celebrations were themselves an act of defiance.
The regime’s response was methodical. Within five days, Murillo was publicly attacking opposition social media sites. Within a week, authorities prevented two artists from completing a mural dedicated to Palacios in the city of Estelí. Within two weeks, Nicaraguan police accused Karen Celebertti, the owner of the Miss Nicaragua franchise who had directed the contest for 23 years, of deliberately rigging beauty contests in favour of competitors critical of the government as part of what they termed a “coup plot”.
Treason Charges for Running a Beauty Pageant
The charges against Celebertti read like Cold War fiction. The National Police claimed she “participated actively, on the internet and in the streets in the terrorist actions of a failed coup,” and alleged she had “remained in contact with the traitors, and offered to employ the franchises, platforms and spaces supposedly used to promote ‘innocent’ beauty pageants, in a conspiracy orchestrated to convert the contests into traps and political ambushes financed by foreign agents”.
Celebertti, her husband Martín Argüello Leiva, and their son Bernardo Argüello Celebertti faced charges of “treason to the motherland”, conspiracy, organised crime, money laundering, and financing of terrorism – all without publicly presented evidence. On 28 November 2023, police raided the family home in Managua and took Martín and Bernardo into custody. Celebertti herself was barred from re-entering Nicaragua on 23 November when she attempted to return from Mexico with her daughter Luciana. According to Confidencial, the independent Nicaraguan media outlet, the whereabouts of Martín and Bernardo were not disclosed by police for days.
The Miss Universe Organization, which had been acquired in October 2022 by Thailand-based JKN Global Group for $14 million under transgender businesswoman Anne Jakapong Jakrajutatip, issued a statement saying it was “working to guarantee the safety of all persons affiliated” with the organisation. Celebertti retired from the Nicaraguan pageant industry in early 2024 and was subsequently appointed director of talent development for the Miss Universe Organization, working from Mexico.
Two Artists, 194 Days in Prison for Painting a Wall
The human cost of Palacios’s crown extended beyond the pageant establishment. In November 2023, muralists Kevin Laguna – known artistically as “Vink” – and Oscar Parrilla Blandón began painting a mural honouring Palacios in the northern city of Estelí. It was, by Laguna’s later account, an act of personal conviction: “Using muralism, I’ve always liked covering events that happen in the country, be they political or environmental. This case seemed important to me, since it was the first time a Nicaraguan was given the Miss Universe title.”
Police intervened and halted the work. Both artists were arrested and charged with “conspiring against the government”. During interrogation, according to Laguna’s interview with Confidencial, an officer told him: “Anyone besides you could have painted the mural of Sheynnis. But because she was messing around on the 18th [April 18, 2018, when mass protests erupted] and you were messing around on the 18th, so they’re sponsoring you.” Laguna had participated in the 2018 protests; his earlier street art from April of that year was presented as evidence at trial.
The partially completed mural was ordered painted over immediately. Laguna and Parrilla spent 194 days in Nicaragua’s El Modelo prison before being released on 5 September 2024 as part of a group of 134 political prisoners freed under a deal between the United States and the Nicaraguan government. Both were subsequently banished to Guatemala and stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality. Laguna later told La Tribuna that Palacios was “indifferent” to the crisis and described her as “a chameleon”. He said he would not paint her again.
A Country That Cannot Say Her Name
Palacios herself did not return to Nicaragua during or after her reign. According to Confidencial, she became the most travelled Miss Universe winner in the pageant’s history, visiting at least 31 countries across Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa – but not her own. In May 2024, Anne Jakrajutatip posted on Instagram that Palacios and her family were in “indefinite exile”, citing the “cruel intentions” of the Ortega government. The post was later edited and comments disabled.
Reports indicated that Palacios’s grandmother and younger brother covertly fled Nicaragua, entering the United States on humanitarian parole to reunite with her mother, Raquel Cornejo, who was already residing in California. Palacios has not publicly confirmed the details. In interviews, she maintains that she has not been officially barred from returning, telling reporters: “My country hasn’t closed the doors, nor have I received documentation or information that I’m not welcome.” Yet the regime’s actions tell a different story.
In April 2024, the Ortega government launched its own beauty pageant, “Reinas de Nicaragua” (Queens of Nicaragua), announced by Murillo as “a beautiful pageant for women, beautiful girls” who are “ambassadors of love for Nicaragua”. The contest was placed under the control of government-linked institutions, including the Youth Ministry, the Tourism Institute, and Nicaragua Diseña, an organisation directed by the Ortegas’ daughter Camila. During the first Ortega government in the mid-1980s, after banning the Miss Nicaragua pageant, the Sandinistas had created a similar replacement called “Miss Youth”, in which contestants were members of the Sandinista Youth and paraded alongside soldiers carrying AK-47 rifles.
Nicaragua did not participate in Miss Universe 2024 in Mexico. The local franchise remains without an owner following Celebertti’s forced retirement. At the 2025 edition in Thailand, Nicaragua achieved a Top 30 placement – its third consecutive qualification – operating in a changed landscape where the relationship between national pageantry and state power had been fundamentally redrawn.
The Crown as Mirror
The story of Sheynnis Palacios and Miss Universe 2023 is not ultimately about a beauty pageant. It is about what happens when a cultural institution designed to project soft power collides with an authoritarian regime determined to control every symbol of national identity.
Palacios herself has remained carefully non-committal, insisting she is a “global ambassador” rather than solely a Nicaraguan representative. Yet there is an implicit tension: she still has family in Nicaragua who could face consequences if she speaks out, and the regime has demonstrated it will punish anyone associated with her political symbolism.
What remains is the contradiction at the heart of the story. A woman who grew up selling fried dough to fund her education, who championed mental health from personal experience, who answered a question about Mary Wollstonecraft with quiet conviction – became, by the mere act of winning, the most dangerous person in the eyes of a government that claimed her victory as its own before realising it had lost control of the narrative.
The blue-and-white gown hangs somewhere. The mural in Estelí was painted over. And Nicaragua’s beauty pageant scene now answers to the state.
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