The crown shines, but the past looks murky
Just when we thought that the only drama in the life of Fátima Bosch would be choosing the color of her new queen’s cape, life shows us, once again, that the universe has a rather twisted sense of humor. It turns out that while the Tabasco woman was practicing her “world peace and love” smile, a ghost from the family past decided that it was the perfect time to come out of the closet (or the judicial file, in this case).
The father of our brand new Miss Universe 2025, Mr. Bernardo Bosch Hernández, had a small, tiny, almost imperceptible brush with the law. Nothing out of this world, just a 10-year disqualification from public office for alleged illicit enrichment during his time as Social Responsibility and Development Manager at Pemex. Because what is a little social responsibility without an inexplicable million-dollar bonus, right?
The details that do not appear in the contest
Things took a turn for the worse in 2019, when the Attorney General’s Office put a magnifying glass on Don Bernardo’s accounts. The investigation revealed that, between 2011 and 2015, the man could not justify a paltry 6.5 million pesos. A figure that, let’s be honest, far exceeds what any of us finds between the sofa cushions. All this while his colleague, Miguel Ángel Lozada Aguilar, was also in the eye of the hurricane.
The Secretary of Public Function did not mess around and let go of his hand: a decade out of the treasury. “And as a consequence, the dismissal of the job, position or commission held therein,” read the official statement from Petróleos Mexicanos in August 2019. A detail that, I am sure, they did not mention in the question round of the contest.
To give it a touch of magical Mexican realism, the director of PEMEX himself, Octavio Romero Oropeza, came out the next day to confirm the paternal punishment with the typical bureaucratic phrase that we all love: “The Secretariat sent a letter, requesting disqualification and we had to proceed with that.” In other words, “I was just following orders, friends.”
The (happy?) ending you didn’t expect
But this is where the plot takes a turn worthy of an afternoon soap opera. Don Bernardo, like any good, self-respecting character, did not fold his arms. He fought the sanction and, oh surprise!, the Federal Court of Administrative Justice (TFJA) ruled in favor of him the following year. They invalidated the penalty arguing that it had no legal basis. What we never knew, and this is where we all raised a skeptical eyebrow, is whether in the end the man managed to prove his income or simply won on a legal technicality.
And like in all good melodrama, there is an ending “and they lived happily ever after.” Or something like that. Because since last October, Bosch Hernández returned to the juicy public sphere as deputy director of Safety and Health at the oil company. Because, clearly, if there’s one thing you need after a corruption scandal, it’s a high-level position in the same place. The moral of the story: a Miss Universe crown can weigh a lot, but not as much as an opacity file at Pemex.
Did you know this chapter in the family history of the new Miss Universe? Share this article on your social networks and discover more stories behind the news that make the headlines. Reality always surpasses fiction.
