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SANTA BARBARA, Honduras (AP) — Maria Jose Alvarado expected difficult questions about her country at the Miss World pageant in London, so the 19-year-old beauty queen enlisted a teacher to help her prepare.
They reviewed the history of Honduras and discussed the gang and drug violence that makes this small Central American republic one of the most dangerous countries in the world.
"She knew that the questions would be about the insecurity and violence because that is what the world knows about Honduras," said Jose Eudaldo Diaz, the philosophy professor coaching her. "Her goal was to explain that she wanted to contribute to a Honduras in which children could walk the streets without fear of being murdered."
Alvarado never made it to the pageant. She was shot to death with her sister Sofia, their bodies discarded on a riverbank. They were laid to rest in a rain-soaked cemetery Thursday.
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The killing is both a family tragedy and a national outrage in a country gripped by a homicidal bloodbath. While many of the daily dead are gangsters, drug traffickers and police officers, many others are taxi drivers, journalists, abused women and nameless innocents caught in the line of fire.
Alvarado would have fallen into the last group were it not for the fact she was unusually beautiful, and rose from humble roots to represent Honduras on a world stage.
"If she had been any other girl, if she hadn't been Miss Honduras, this would have been one more crime amid the impunity of Honduras," said Jose Luis Mejia, director of the Technological University campus in Santa Barbara, where Alvarado studied. "They would have said what they always do: that this was the settling of accounts between drug traffickers, and they wouldn't even have bothered to investigate."
Most South American cocaine headed for the U.S. passes through Honduras, and Santa Barbara is on a main trafficking corridor. Officially, the sisters' killing isn't related to drug violence. Police say Sofia's suitor, Plutarco Ruiz, confessed to shooting the women in a jealous rage.
But to Alvarado's friends and family, the killings are the result of a traditional machismo made worse by the wealth and muscle of drug traffickers.
"This region is imbued with narco culture represented by the image of a man who moves in a big car, drinks, takes drugs, walks around armed and is bad," Mejia said. "The culture of violence and death."
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The youngest of three sisters, Alvarado began competing in pageants at age 13. After each competition, she returned to share her experiences with friends, who described her as generous and innocent.
"Her successes were our successes," said Ludin Reyes, a schoolmate. "We were friends and fans."
While Alvarado pursued her dream, and her oldest sister married and moved away, Sofia was not so lucky, friends and officials said. The school where she taught closed, and a man she loved was slain last year.
Then Sofia took up with Ruiz. He was known about town as a man to be feared, from a family deeply involved in drug trafficking, officials say. "Plutarco is a violent person with a bad character and he solves everything with a pistol in his hand," said Lt. Col Ramon Castillo, an army officer in charge of security in Santa Barbara.
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It's a mystery to Alvarado's friends why she went with her sister to a rundown riverfront restaurant that was believed to be a place Ruiz used to conduct illegal business. But Alvarado looked up to her big sister and apparently wanted to join Sofia for a Nov. 13 party to celebrate Ruiz's birthday.
According to police, Sofia and Ruiz argued over her dancing with another man. He shot the two women and buried them by the river.
The next day, Ruiz told Alvarado's family the women had left the party with someone else. But eventually investigators wrested a confession and he led police to their bodies.
Mayor Juan Alvarado says it is widely believed police waited days to interrogate Ruiz to give him a chance to escape. But in a country where impunity prevails, he didn't run.
"He felt so immune that he didn't flee because he trusted they would never detain him," said the mayor, who is not related to the beauty queen's family.
At her modest home on an unpaved road, Alvarado's mother grapples with the loss of her beauty queen daughter and the sister who led her to her death.
"Poor Sofia," said the mother, Teresa Munoz. "I forgive her because she was responsible for what they did to her sister, for the fact that Maria Jose died, too."
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