The Miss Perú 2018 Beauty Pageant was held on October 29 this year. In an interesting turn of events, the 23 contestants recited statistics of violence against women instead of their body measurements. The organizers also displayed media portraying prominent gender-based violence during other sections of the pageant. This was not advertised ahead of time, leaving viewers shocked. When interviewed, the contest organizer Jessica Newton said, “Unfortunately, there are many women who do not know, and think they are isolated cases.” Using the publicized event as a platform for this issue was guaranteed to bring more attention to it. Newton then went on to point out that, out of the 150 contestants that started out, five of them had been victims of violence.
Gender-based violence has long been an issue in Perú. According to the Observatory of Citizen Security of the Organization of American States, Perú is the penultimate perpetrator of violence against women with only Bolivia topping it. More than 700 women have been killed between 2009 and 2015 in Perú. The cause of death has been labeled “femicide”, a term attributed to women killed in certain circumstances. The Miss Perú 2018 Beauty Pageant isn’t the only protest against Perú’s problem with violence against women. Despite congress passing a law in 2015 to prevent and punish violence against women, there were large protests in Lima last year demanding that the authorities do more. The winner of this year’s pageant claimed in her end interview that her plan to help end the violence would be to “implement a database containing the name of each aggressor, not only for femicide but for every kind of violence against women. In this way, we can protect ourselves.”
Latin Americans are portrayed in something of a negative light merely by association to the harsh statistics, but the subjects of the article itself are actively fighting against gender-based violence. Newton and the other organizers took an event generally expected to provide light, easy entertainment and used it to give airtime to a serious problem. This and the article itself paints those involved in a positive light for their activism.
This relates to the themes of our class in that it addresses the treatment of Latino people through the lens of gender. Women in colonial Latin America experienced life differently from men, a fact that perhaps hasn’t changed as much as we might wish. The Spanish have long been notable for their notions of chivalry/chauvinism and strict ideas of the roles of men and women. This article enforces that that’s something that hasn’t changed much.