Beauty business with an ugly side

ALONG with their coffee and their football, Colombians love nothing better than a beauty pageant. They were glued to their sets early yesterday to watch Miss Colombia take on 80 other girls for the Miss Universe title in Hawaii.

Their first hope? That their girl, Silvia Fernanda Ortiz, came home with the crown. As it turned out, she dropped out in the last five. Their second? That Miss Ortiz can stay out of the clutches of the drug lords, who are known for buying young beauty queens - often from poor families - with lavish gifts, jewellery, cash and cocaine.

Colombians were reminded of the problem last week when Luis Murcia Sierra, better known by his nickname Martelo, was detained in the capital on suspicion of heading the notorious Bogota cocaine cartel. With him when arrested was Paula Andrea Salazar, a teenage beauty queen running for the provincial title of Miss Cartagena.

When the anti-drug squad found Martelo's personal photo album, it was full of sexy pictures of other beauty queens, including a former Miss Brazil - Leila Christine Schuester.

"I like beauty queens. I used to change them every week but the Brazilian was the best of my life," the suspected drug lord told police. Another picture was of Alexandra Serrano, a beautiful teenage television presenter, who later admitted to Colombian reporters that she had met Martelo when she was 14 and that he had been "a divine boyfriend" until last year.

Since his detention, Martelo has been visited by a succession of beauty queens, models and young female television or film stars, police said. That reminded people of a former runner-up for Miss Colombia who, two weeks after the pageant, was found to have made an overnight conjugal visit to a jailed drug lord. She was stripped of her title.

Another former Miss Colombia runner-up, Claudia Milena Garcia, admitted this week that she had had an affair with Luis Carlos Aguilar, a "lieutenant" of former Medellin cartel chief Pablo Escobar.

Escobar, killed by Colombian troops five years ago, was renowned for buying beautiful women and taking them to his various ranches for weekend parties. His favourite game was watching them slide naked down the banisters of his staircase.

Although Martelo had many properties, police found his key possessions in three suitcases - one full of emeralds and diamonds, one packed with cellular telephones and a pistol, and the third listing his bank accounts and payments to contacts.

Martelo's father, Lucho Murcia, is one of Colombia's top emerald dealers - a business rife with violence and often used as a money laundering outlet for the cocaine cartels.