The state where beauty queens mix with drug kings

María Susana Flores Gámez looked at the red light above the television camera indicating that she was on air and nervously took hold of the microphone. She looked like a child, excited about representing her country in an upcoming beauty pageant in China. The Sinaloa native had spent 17 of her 22 years participating in pageants. "I think the judges voted for me because of my skin and because of my dark complexion. They tell me that I am the typical Mexican beauty," she told a Sinaloa television station about 10 months ago.

"Susy," as she was known, was buried last week in her beauty queen gown during a well-attended funeral covered by journalists from all over the world in the small town of Guamúchil, Sinaloa.

She died on November 24, gunned down during a battle between alleged drug traffickers and the army in which four other people were killed. She was a passenger in a vehicle that the purported traffickers used to escape. An AK-47 assault rifle was found next to her body.

Mexico's Attorney General's Office has conducted forensic tests to see if Susy fired the weapon. A source at the prosecutor's office told the Associated Press that Susy emerged from the vehicle with the rifle, but it is thought that she was being "used as a human shield."

A capo wants a beautiful woman and there are many of them who want the wealth, power and prestige"

What appears certain is that she may have been the girlfriend or companion of one of the gunmen in the vehicle.

It isn't unusual for beauty queens to mix with Mexico's notorious narco figures. In his book, El culto de las reinas de Sinaloa y el poder de la belleza (or, The cult of the Sinaloa queens and the power of beauty), professor Arturo Santamaría Gómez said relationships between pageant participants and drug traffickers go back decades. He claims that Miss Sinaloa 1955 was the girlfriend of a powerful US drug capo.

Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, alias "Don Neto," the notorious leader of the now-defunct Guadalajara cartel in the 1980s, was married to another beauty queen as was Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín "Chapo" Guzmán.

"They both seek each other out," says Santamaría. "A capo wants a beautiful woman and there are many of them who want the wealth, power and prestige that only this type of relationship can give them in some circles."

Drug trafficking and beauty pageants are seen as social trampolines in the Mexican state on the Pacific. Chapo, the world's most wanted trafficker, "has never had so much prestige as he does now" among certain people because he married a beauty queen, Santamaría says.

Each year, dozens of women gain instant fame by becoming queens in the countless pageants that are held across the state.

Susy studied communications at university but her CV was filled with her pageant winnings. She was hoping to progress and participate in the coveted Miss Universe pageant.