One of the things I enjoy the most about having lived in two different cultures is that your pool of stories and anecdotes grows a lot. And then it is nice to tell the contrasts between cultures based on your stories. I like getting the surprise faces in both sides.
I am sure one of the things European people could find difficult to assimilate is the importance beauty contests have in tropical countries like Colombia. Of course, I know almost every country in the world elects its own 'miss', but in most of them media coverage is rather low, which corresponds to the irrelevant, frivolous character a beauty contest has. Not in Colombia: both the election of Miss Colombia and her later 'performance' in Miss Universe are something extremely relevant for Colombian society. This could be considered the tropical instance of a feature commonly found in western societies: beauty is key to obtain respect and recognition from your peers, in detriment of other qualities or values such as intelligence or honesty.
In Colombia every town has its very own 'miss', that is usually elected each year in the town's festivity. Miss Colombia is elected from a group of candidates, each one representing a region or state (a candidate of a region, in turn, is selected from a smaller, local contest). The nationwide contest takes place in November in Cartagena, and draws all the media attention that you can imagine. This is specially annoying because the contest has associated several irrelevant events, and the whole thing might last a month, so you can imagine how interesting the associated media coverage is.
Beauty contests in Colombia are useful to reveal how low our collective self-esteem is. I mention this because of the outcome of the 2008 edition of Miss Universe, which took place in Vietnam last week. After almost two decades of systematic failures, the Colombian candidate managed to arrive to the final stage of the competition with the highest scores in the preliminary rounds. She was competing with the Venezuelan candidate. Of course both girls were astonishing. Apparently the final decision was made on the answers both of them gave to some random questions. It seems the answer the Venezuelan girl gave was more appropriate (or conversely, less stupid) than the one my fellow Colombian gave. (You can see the intellectually challenging final questions round here.) Taking into account the answers, and in spite of the scores of the previous rounds, the jury decided that Miss Venezuela is Miss Universe 2008.
This was on Sunday night. On Monday there was a national crisis because of the result. People was deeply disappointed, facebook groups were created to describe the miserable fraud and sorrow, and the media asked groups of "experts" to explain such an unexpected outcome. The generalized reaction was that Colombia was victim of an international conspiracy. Several conjectures were proposed on the origins of such a conspiracy. The first one is that Donald Trump (the owner of the contest) has interests in Venezuela and hence electing Miss Venezuela could have a positive influence in his businesses there. A second one says that Hugo Chavez (president of Venezuela) bribed the jury of the contest with his "petrodollars", something unfeasible for the (poor, honest) Colombian government. Other conjectures, mixing the two before with the fact that the Colombian candidate "had connected to Vietnamese people" and "was nicer than the rest" were proposed too. Previous editions of the contest in which Colombia also arrived in second place were accommodated into a larger, everlasting beauty conspiracy theory.
I am not really able to explain why Colombian people react in this way when dealing with a collective defeat or loss. In general, I find it quite lame to blame others, or to invent stupid conspiracy theories, to try to justify your own deficiencies. (In the Miss Universe case, people is not able to see that the weak answer to the final question might have ruined everything.) I claim this persecution complex is a consequence the low self-esteem we Colombians have as a whole. In a worldwide context, not only we are ashamed of our country but we tend to believe the rest is doing fishy stuff against us. Perhaps it's something related to the latinamerican idiosyncrasy but my lack of knowledge of other tropical countries prevents me from further concluding. As I argued in another post, Colombians are not aware Colombia is "below" in some 'implicit ranking of countries', which might lead to a reinforcement of our destiny of failure in case of a negative outcome in any kind of competition.
Colombian society kinds of enjoy suffering with the most deserved things that others took from us (such as beauty contests hosted by Jerry Springer (!) or important football matches) and finding external "responsibles" (such as greedy Donald Trumps or unfair referees). I am afraid this kind of attitudes is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to change.
Update (17/07/2008). The Colombian candidate is still blaming others for the outcome. She found a responsible, way more powerful than Trump or Chavez, but a bit more abstract than them: God. At her arrival at Colombia, she said her answer to the question hadn't had any influence on the final result: "God wanted me to arrive in second place; he wanted Miss Venezuela to win". Argh.
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