Miss Bolivia is face of war on drugs

Santa Cruz, Bolivia: Rare is the international beauty pageant contestant who does not speak of an enthusiasm for seeing the world and doing good works.

Jessica Anne Jordan Burton, however, has taken it a step further: the British-born champion has swapped her crown as Miss Bolivia for a new and somewhat more dangerous job pitted against drug traffickers and paramilitaries.

Burton, 26, who has an English father and Bolivian mother, has caught the eye not just of the beauty judges but of Bolivia's Left-wing President, Evo Morales, who has hand-picked her to be his personal representative in one of his fiefdom's most hostile regions. As the new development chief for the border province of Beni, a restive jungle backwater plagued with right-wing separatists, ethnic Indian militants and Colombian drug traffickers, she will have the task of lavishing cash on the region in a bid to boost her boss's popularity.

It is, however, a job that may attract attention for a different reason: as Morales' special envoy, she admits she will be at risk of assassination from his political enemies. "I don't fear for my safety although my family is afraid of what might happen," says Burton, who represented Bolivia in the 2006 Miss Universe contest, and who will now be managing a budget of $700 million (Dh2.57 billion) to build highways, schools, hospitals and sanitation.

Criticism

"I feel that the people want to work with me, that they have confidence in me. I feel like I'm in my place. It's my destiny," she said.

Burton's appointment to the post of ‘director for development of frontier zones and macroregions' comes on the heels of her narrow defeat in a local race for governor, and critics say the new post has been deliberately created to usurp the power of her elected rival.

There is also the question of her qualifications for the job. "Jessica has no experience," says Adriana Gil, a former Morales supporter-turned-opposition MP. "I just know her as a model and have only heard her talk about light topics."

Burton was born in Bath, Somerset, to a British engineer who met her mother while working in Bolivia during the 1980s. She returned to Bolivia as a young girl with her mother when her parents divorced. "I am mostly British even if I don't look it," she said, adding that she still holds a British passport.

She started on the catwalk at 16 in the eastern city of Santa Cruz and was signed up by the local elite model agency, Promotions Gloria, which has produced every Miss Bolivia since 1985.

"I was always more interested in politics than in becoming a beauty queen," Burton insisted. "I saw the title of Miss Bolivia as a stepladder towards a political career."

Her world debut at the Miss Universe pageant in 2006 coincided with the inauguration of Morales, a former coca farmer, as Bolivia's first ethnic Andean-Indian president. Born of a lower-class background, and keen on cultivating ties with both Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Morales did not go down well in the eastern lowlands, which are dominated by wealthy, white Bolivians of European descent.

"I was always inclined to help the poor. I guess it's socialist," Burton said.

She claims that the re-election of right-wing governor Ernesto Suarez — who beat her by two points — was the result of fraud. "My appointment is not to compensate me but to compensate the people," she said. Opponents, however, have criticised her new appointment as a ‘viceroyalty' imposed by Morales in a region where his government has consistently fared poorly in the polls.

Many also believe she could be dangerously out of her depth in what is essentially a lawless and chaotic frontier zone where Colombian drug trafficking gangs operate huge cocaine refineries and clandestine airstrips. Foreign mercenaries from the Balkans have also been active in assisting separatist militias, and there are reports that Shining Path terrorists from neighbouring Peru are taking refuge in Beni's remote marshlands.

But the beauty queen insists she will take it all in her elegant stride, citing Morales' own example. "Experience is the least of it," she said. "We saw lack of experience in the president, an Indian who never finished high school and has done so much for Bolivia."