'Queen of cocaine' expresses regret.

From her very humble beginnings in Barranquilla, Colombia, she rose to be one of
her country's most coveted beauty queens.
At 21, Angie Sanclemente Valencia was
crowned as Colombia's "Queen of Coffee." It was 2000 and the beginning
of a career
that would propel Sanclemente into the world
of her dreams as an internationally
acclaimed model. After winning the
Colombian pageant, she quickly found work
as a lingerie model in Mexico and other countries. She also started
training as an
actress and took theater lessons. But Sanclemente's career came to a
screeching halt in May of 2010 when she was
arrested in Argentina and charged with drug
trafficking. Interpol had issued an arrest warrant
against her in December of the previous year
after she was connected to a 21-year-old
woman who was arrested just before she
was to board a flight to Cancun, Mexico, from
Buenos Aires carrying 55 kilograms of cocaine (120 pounds). The fallen
beauty was
on the run for five months, hiding in
Argentina. While on the run, Sanclemente continued to
update her Facebook page. In a Facebook
message to CNN in 2010, she denied any
involvement in the case, writing, "I'm very
sad and hurt by the bad information. I don't
know how the press can destroy an innocent person." After being
convicted in early November,
Sanclemente is speaking from prison for the
first time. It's quite a change from the life of
glamor she lived before her arrest. "I have been here [in prison] one year and
seven months. I'm innocent of all of the
accusations. It was all a big
misunderstanding," Sanclemente said. Her 2010 arrest was an
international scandal
and her Interpol mugshot made headlines
around the world. The former queen of
coffee became known as "the queen of
cocaine." Four men and two other women
were also arrested in connection with the case. Argentinian
authorities charged her with
leading a ring of fashion models to smuggle
cocaine from South America and into Europe,
via Cancun. She says her Argentinian
boyfriend and his uncle, who are also in
prison, were indeed involved in drug trafficking, but not her. "It may
sound ridiculous and incredible, but
I'm innocent of this farce they invented. My
boyfriend made a mistake, and I'm paying
the consequences. But I love him and I love
him because he loves me just the way I am. I
never found in anybody else what I found in him," Sanclemente said.
Now 32 and sentenced to six years and eight
months behind bars, the promising career
she once had seems like a vanished dream.
Nicolas Gualco, her boyfriend, and Daniel
Monroy, Gualco's uncle, have also received
the same sentence. Moving to Argentina from Mexico,
Sanclemente says in retrospect, was a big
mistake. "I regret having taken the flight to
Argentina, to be honest with you." Sanclemente had expressed regret once
before about making the wrong choices. She
was dethroned as Colombia's queen of coffee
for breaking the rules by having been
married. Reports say that she was once
married to a Mexican drug trafficker, but she's always denied that was
the case. In an interview shortly after being
dethroned, she spoke about the consequences
of not listening to the woman who raised her
as single mother. "I'm very capricious and a
lot of [bad] things have happened to me for
not listening to my mother," Sanclemente says. Her words now seem prophetic.

Posted by Chrisray

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