Staff Writer
Maria Jose Alvarado, also known as
Miss Honduras, was killed just two days before she was scheduled to represent
her country in the 2014 Miss World pageant. Alvarado and her sister, Sofia
Trinidad, were reported missing on November 13 after not returning home from
Trinidad’s boyfriend’s birthday party. Witnesses say they last saw the sisters
leaving the party in a vehicle without any license plates. Police began looking
for the two girls and initially narrowed the suspects down to four men.
Trinidad’s boyfriend Plutarco Ruiz,
eventually admitted to shooting the girls in a fit of jealous rage after seeing
Trinidad dancing with another man at his party, and led the police to the
bodies early Wednesday morning. The bodies were uncovered in a remote gravesite
240 miles away from Honduras’s capital. Police identified the bodies, murder weapon,
and the vehicle in which the bodies were carried to their hiding place,
concluding that Trinidad was shot first, and Alvarado was shot twice as she
attempted to flee the scene.
Teresa Munoz, the sisters’
mother says that Ruiz called her the morning after the party, appearing
to be extremely worried about the girls’ disappearance, and joined her on the
trip to the police station to report them missing. Claudio Munoz, the girls’
uncle said, "We didn't file a
complaint right away because we were waiting for a telephone call asking for
ransom. On Saturday their mother and I went to put in a complaint, and
the killer was with us."
Honduras
has the highest murder rate of any country not at war, with 95 killings per
100,000 people. The country’s streets are overrun with drug trafficking and
gangs, forcing many unaccompanied minors to escape the violence by migrating to
the United States.
The
Center for Women’s rights based in the Honduras’s capital confirmed that the
deaths of the beauty queen and her sister were just two of 328 female murders
in 2014, and says, “the Honduran government does the absolute minimum to stop
these things from happening, as well as when punishing the people responsible.”
This crime that police are referring to as an “act of passion” committed by Ruiz, resulted in the loss of a woman who aspired to be a diplomat, and initially took on a modeling career to support her struggling family.
