Aktueel magazine nr 38
September 22 1984
Ex Miss Holland and Miss Nicaragua drove along with Aktueel
10.000 km in a Traction from Paris to Moscow
This article from Aktueel is about friendships which started at a pageant. Nannie and Ivania met at Miss Universe 1976 in Hong Kong. They are still friends and 40 years after the competition (2017) they also met again at a reunion in India.
Beautiful Exile became our cover girl
Specially for the cover of this Aktueel and other illustration materials, Middle American Ivania Navarro and Dutch Nannie Nielen (ice second at Miss Holland), posed for our photographer in Paris.
Ivania, an exotic, Nicaragua born beauty, was in the newspapers because of her sad life story, which looks like it came from a Harold Robbins novel. Ivania could have been in the seventh heaven. It became hell, when this Mayor’s daughter was crowned Nicaragua’s most beautiful, after the Sandinista revolution could not return to her country and her father. Since then she wanders the world like a beautiful exile.
Twelve years ago Ivania left her birth country to finish her high school in the United States. After that she went to the University of Montreal in Canada, where she studied political sciences and the languages French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian.
“Halfway those studies, I went home on vacation’, Ivania remembers. Friends did enter me for fun in a beauty contest. Nobody expected that I would participate, but why not, is seemed exciting. One month later I was Miss Nicaragua.
After that everything went fast. First Miss Universe Hong Kong, where I met Nannie. One week later I became first in the Dominican Republic at Miss Tourism, and also first in Aruba at Miss Teenage International*. A paid for cruise in the Caribbean followed, modeling jobs in Peru and Brasil, invitations to go to London and Haiti and many photo sessions in Nicaragua.’ The world was at the feet of this Middle American beauty.
In 1979 in Nicaragua a civil war started and the Sandinista government were in power.
‘In the beginning I wanted to go back to my country from Montreal. Everybody wanted to get rid of Dictator Somoza and hoped the Sandinistas would change everything. But that was not so. They lacked of the free elections, there was no freedom of press, the economy collapsed and random arrest were made on a daily basis. Going back to Nicaragua was and is not possible’
Only her father still lives in Nicaragua. Once he was the Mayor of the third city of the country, Matagalpa, and for Latin American standards quite a wealthy businessman. The Marxists took everything away from him and he cannot leave. The both of us will need to cope ourselves.’
Dark Ivania and blonde Nannie with a Traction from 1934
*Note: Miss Teenage International should be Miss Teenage Intercontinental. Nowadays known as Miss Intercontinental.
Credits
Text and Photos: Jaap Bouman
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