Beauty pageant officials strip off Miss Mexico’s controversial dress

Widespread anger forced Mexican beauty pageant officials to abandon plans to have Miss Mexico wear a dress with bullet belts and images of hangings (image) during the Miss Universe pageant. Though the debate over abortion has split Mexico, members on both sides of the political spectrum repudiated the dress as not only a glorification of violence but also that it was meant as a tribute to the Cristero War of the 1920s. The three-year conflict arose between catholic and anti-catholic factions and cost approximately 90,000 lives.

La Jornada columnist Jorge Camil observed the absurdness of having Miss Mexico wear a cristero dress:

"It would be like Miss USA wearing a dress showing images of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South, with their hoods, their burning crosses and beer cans. A beauty contest is very far from being the right place to vent political and religious ideologies."

Could you imagine having Miss Colombia dress up as a drug mule or Miss Puerto Rico have a costume of a massacred Taino "indian"? Though the notion of a cristero dress is silly, at least pageant officials came to their senses before it was displayed on the world stage.

Links- Milenio, International Herald Tribune, Wikipedia, The Latin Americanist

Image- Milenio (Miss Mexico wearing the infamous cristero dress earlier this year)