Venezuela once again hits the beauty spot
The nation has traditionally been the home of beauty queens, something largely owing to Osmel Sousa, a man with a passion for preparing women for pageants.
CARACAS, VENEZUELA — Osmel Sousa finally got his groove back.
Famous in the 1980s and '90s for producing international beauty queens at his school for pageant contestants, Sousa ended a 12-year drought last month when protege Dayana Mendoza took the Miss Universe 2008 crown in Vietnam.
After taking over as director of the Miss Venezuela pageant in 1981, Sousa went on an incredible 15-year tear, molding winners of dozens of international beauty contests, including seven Miss World and Miss Universe titles.
His record helped establish Venezuela's fame for beautiful women -- probably its second-best-known natural resource after oil.
"Sousa created a myth for Venezuelan women to live up to," local pollster Alfredo Keller said. "In the States, you have the feminine culture of Barbie. Here it's all about the Misses."
The legend of the Cuban-born Sousa :// www.missvenezuela.com/1998/ing/intervws/osmel/index.htm "> www.missvenezuela.com/1998/ing/intervws/osmel/index.htm as a Latin American Henry Higgins grew from an uncanny knack for picking women out of crowds or off catwalks and making them glamour queens. He accomplished it, he acknowledges unabashedly, with discipline, training, dental work and plastic surgery.
"I don't make ugly girls into beauties. That's not my job. Plus, it's not necessary. There are plenty of beautiful women in Venezuela. What I do is make them perfect," the 60-year-old said in an interview late last month, still basking in the glow of Mendoza's victory.
But before that victory July 14, many observers feared Sousa had lost his touch. No Miss Venezuela had taken the sine qua non title of Miss Universe since the 1996 crowning of Alicia Machado.
"If you don't score a goal in 12 years, naturally it's going to affect your self-confidence," said Carlos Bardasano, vice president of Cisneros Group, the media conglomerate that owns the Miss Venezuela pageant and finances Sousa's academy.
Various theories were floated in this beauty-pageant-mad nation about why Venezuela was falling short. "It certainly wasn't a problem with the raw material," said Keller, the pollster. "Beautiful women continue to exist here."
Some said the Miss Universe organization was gun-shy about choosing another Venezuelan in light of its experience with Machado, who put on weight during her year as title holder, later posed for Playboy and recently had a child out of wedlock with a married man.
