Pageants are old-fashioned here but in Venezuela, where girls are trained at a military-style beauty school, they are big business.
by Thomas Walker
He drifted into the room, leant on the bar and reached for a pastry. While waiters in bow-ties served coffee and chardonnay, Osmel Sousa finished off his croissant, surveyed the buzz of journalists and TV executives and gave a knowing smile. The 60-year-old, impeccably dressed, as you might expect from someone who has helped to make beauty a symbol of Venezuelan national pride, looked on as six of his 2008 graduate class sauntered in wearing towering high heels.
The graduates were candidates for this year's Miss Venezuela contest and Sousa, president of the pageant, was their proud headmaster. Last night, the new Miss Venezuela was crowned in an arena of 15,000 fans; the show beamed into millions of homes. This is the biggest event in the Caracas calendar and for the winner, stardom awaits. As Roland Carreño, a Venezuelan pundit, says: “Miss Venezuela has always been a dream factory.”
A few days before the grand final last night I sat in on the showcase preview of the top six “Misses”. Dressed identically in tight blue jeans and tiny black T-shirts, they wore matching white sashes, emblazoned with the name of their home states. There was Miss Portuguesa, a tanned 20-year-old fashion student with dyed blonde hair, and the stunning 19-year-old Miss Bolvar, one of only two darker skinned contestants. Next to them stood the very thin Miss Trujillo, whose striking features, black hair and porcelain complexion made her the critics' favourite for the crown.
The contestants may be eye-catching, but the man behind it all is Sousa. Dainty and softly spoken, with thinning white-blond hair and an endless array of sharp suits and pink pocket handkerchiefs, he has become a national icon by cultivating one of Venezuela's most famous (and renew- able) natural resources: beautiful women.
And Sousa takes his job very seriously; his goal is to nurture the next Miss Universe, and even after 28 years at the helm, Venezuela's Henry Higgins doesn't like to lose. “They are ready to win,” he says of his protégées. “The preparation for Miss Venezuela is akin to that of a top athlete.” So great is Sousa's power that he brushes away talk of politics - “[President] Chávez?” he scoffs. “Who's he?”
In recent years beauty pageants in the UK and the US have become sources of derision; for many, the crass questions and endless swimsuit parades are a throwback from a more sexist age. The YouTube sensation last year - when Miss Teen South Carolina struggled to explain why so many Americans are bad at geography - suggests that this is unlikely to change.
But here Miss Venezuela is the most watched TV programme every year and the glitzy performance last night was the culmination of months of hard work from Sousa and his team. Each year, the selection process begins in March when thousands of women between the ages of 17 and 25 apply to take part; 500 are picked to enter their state beauty competitions. The 60 regional winners are then taken to the Miss Venezuela school in Caracas for two months of intensive training before a casting in July when Sousa and his team select the final 28 who will compete before judges for the Miss Venezuela crown. “In other countries there is no organisation like there is here,” says Sousa. “We have our school where the girls are prepared for this philosophy: to be beauty queens.” The aim, he explains, is “to make them perfect”.
The school is a large pink building at the foot of the Avila mountain in northern Caracas, a block from the Venevision studios - the channel that funds and broadcasts Miss Venezuela. Students from outside the capital are put up in nearby rooms and subjected to gruelling days, often starting at 8am and finishing at 10pm. The lucky few who go on to compete at an international level stay at the school for a year.
An army of more than nine teachers give classes on how to walk in high heels, voice and movement, posing for photographs, etiquette, and the vital interview techniques. The contestants are also taught to apply their make-up - and what can't be hidden by foundation can be rectified in other ways. Plastic surgery in Venezuela is relatively affordable compared with the UK, and breast implants - which can cost as little as £1,300 - are not uncommon among teenage girls desperate to emulate these living Barbies.
Such measures must be taken to create the perfect contestant, admits Sousa, who prefers radical procedures such as liposuction as the simplest way to deal with a contestant's “excess” weight. “If a girl is lazy in going to the gym and has to work on her waistline, I think it's much easier to get it all out in one go,” he says. Nose jobs and “thigh trimmings” are also frequent over the duration of the course, but Sousa's view is that they are “correcting little details”.
The fairytale image of a beautiful girl plucked from a slum and turned into a supermodel is a far cry from the reality of Miss Venezuela. Most hopefuls come from affluent backgrounds, many are university students, or have worked as models.
Jennipher Bortolas, 18, born in San Cristóbal, in the Venezuelan Andes, is better known as Miss Tchira. She entered her first pageant while still at primary school. Now a civil engineering student, she had never left her home state until she was brought to Caracas to attend the academy. She found it very tough at first. “The regime is exactly like a military school, the only difference is we don't have the heavy uniforms,” she says. Ly Jonaitis, 22, won Miss Venezuela two years ago. “The preparation is hard,” she says. “You have to get up early to go to the gym, to speech classes, but I'd definitely do it all again.”
Last week Jonaitis's own variety show began on Venevision, and the channel is shrewd at reaping the rewards of its costly training, often recruiting former contestants for its soap operas and other TV programmes after the competition.
Whatever you think of his methods, Sousa can mould a champion. Since joining the “Miss” team in 1969, Sousa, who was born in Cuba to Spanish parents and moved to Venezuela as a teenager, has had a hand in many successes, including seven Miss World and Miss Universe titles. In July, 22-year-old Dayana Mendoza won Venezuela the Miss Universe title for the first time since 1996.
Beauty pageants take place in schools and towns across the nation and young girls are drawn to the apparent glamour in a country where looks can count for everything. “You aspire to the image of the Misses. They're thin, beautiful, almost perfect,” says Yenniffer Ferreira, 21, a student from Caracas, who had breast implants two years ago. Her friend and classmate Greys Pealoza, 19, is now recovering from rhinoplasty and a breast enlargement operation over her summer holidays.
That Sousa played a part in creating this legend of the South American beauty is unquestionable. And while the surgeon's knife may have also had an important role in the tale, few people here see much wrong with a little help from a scalpel. As Mendoza, Sousa's star pupil of 2007, enjoys her year as the reigning queen of the world's beauty pageants, the man behind it all can be sure that he hasn't lost his touch. As Ferreira puts it, “We have always had gorgeous women, he just showed them to the world.”