Ecuadorian TV host and actress Alejandra Jaramillo, known as "La Caramelo," is under fire after celebrating Mexico's elimination from the 2026 World Cup.
Jaramillo, a panelist on TelevisaUnivision's ¡Siéntese Quien Pueda!, built her career hosting and acting on Ecuadorian networks like Ecuavisa and RTS before joining the U.S. market in 2022. The backlash began on July 5, when she posted a video celebrating England's 3-2 win over Mexico, seen as payback for Mexico's earlier defeat of Ecuador.
Critics called it disrespectful toward the Mexican audience her network serves, and some demanded her removal. She removed the video but stood by her reaction, saying she won't let criticism control how she expresses herself. She remains on air, and TelevisaUnivision has not commented.
"La Caramelo": From Child TV Star to Ecuadorian Household Name
Long before she was trading barbs on a debate panel in the United States, Alejandra Jaramillo was a twelve-year-old with a spot in a children's dance troupe on Ecuadorian television. It's the kind of origin story that sounds almost too neat for a career that would eventually stretch across two countries and two decades, and yet, for anyone who has followed her rise, it tracks perfectly with everything that came after.
Born María Alejandra Jaramillo López on December 13, 1992, in Esmeraldas, a coastal province known for its lush landscapes and vibrant culture, she moved with her family to Guayaquil after finishing primary school. It was there that her entertainment career quietly began to take shape, not through some dramatic discovery, but through school theater competitions, the kind of low-stakes stage time that ends up mattering far more than anyone expects at the time.
By 2005, at just twelve years old, she'd landed a spot in Magneto, a children's variety program, where she performed as part of the show's youth dance group and worked as a mini-host. Two years later she was already stepping into scripted television, joining the cast of the telenovela Cholicienta. That same stretch of her early teens saw her take the reins of Destino Aventura at fifteen, an adventure-travel program that gave her some of her first real hosting experience outside of a studio set.
What followed was a steady climb through nearly every major network in Ecuadorian television. She spent time at Gamavisión, where she worked as both host and actress across a string of programs, including Te tomaste la noche, El matinal, Las Mañanitas, Te Cuento Qué, and the reality competition Guerra de Sueños. She also picked up an acting credit playing "La Comadre Lolita" during the final seasons of the TC Televisión series Mi Recinto.
It was her move to Ecuavisa, though, that turned her into a genuinely recognizable name across the country. Starting in 2018, she became part of the hosting lineup for En Contacto, the network's flagship morning show, appearing alongside a rotating cast of well-known Ecuadorian media personalities. Somewhere along the way, the nickname stuck: "La Caramelo," sweet, approachable, and hard to look away from on screen. It's the kind of nickname that only survives if the public actually likes you, and in Jaramillo's case, it clearly did.
From Guayaquil to Univision: Alejandra Jaramillo's Decade-Long Rise in Latin TV
Television careers built entirely within one country's borders are common. Careers that successfully jump borders, languages, and audience expectations are rarer, and that's really the throughline of Jaramillo's story over the past several years.
Her hosting resume in Ecuador kept expanding well beyond the early-morning slot. In 2017, she joined Vamos Con Todo on RTS, sharing a panel with other established faces in Ecuadorian entertainment television. A year later, during the buildup to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, she hosted La Fiesta del Gol, a program built around match coverage and football culture, an early sign of the sports-adjacent media work that would resurface, in a very different and far more controversial form, years later. In 2019, she added a game-show credit to her resume as a presenter on Prueba de Amor.
Then, in 2020, she crossed a meaningful threshold in her acting career: her first leading role, in the telenovela Sí se puede, alongside a cast that included Eduardo Maruri Plaza and Diego Chiang. For a performer who had spent most of her career hosting rather than acting, a lead role in a scripted series marked a genuine expansion of her range, proof that the "host" label didn't fully capture what she was capable of.
The real turning point, though, came in 2022, when she began building a presence in the United States, eventually landing with TelevisaUnivision. She now appears as a panelist on ¡Siéntese Quien Pueda!, a talk and debate-style entertainment program under the Univision umbrella, a format that rewards quick wit and strong opinions, both of which she'd spent years sharpening on Ecuadorian variety television. Alongside her partner, Colombian content creator Beta Mejía, she also competed on and won the reality competition ¿Apostarías Por Mí?, which premiered on Univision, UniMás, ViX, and Las Estrellas in January 2026.
Off screen, she's built out a business side to match her media presence, founding the health and lifestyle brand Mundo Keto and cultivating a social media following that now numbers in the millions on Instagram alone. It's a fairly modern career arc: a television host becomes a cross-border TV personality and becomes an entrepreneur, all while keeping the same audience following along the entire way.
Actress, Host, Entrepreneur: The Many Faces of Alejandra Jaramillo
Ask five different people to describe Alejandra Jaramillo and you might get five different answers, and all of them would be at least partly right. That's arguably the clearest sign that her career has genuinely diversified rather than simply relocated.
As a host, she's spent years mastering the specific skill set that live entertainment television demands: quick transitions, audience rapport, comfort with unscripted moments, and the ability to carry a segment even when the material is thin. That's the foundation she built at Gamavisión, RTS, and Ecuavisa, and it's the same skill set she now applies on ¡Siéntese Quien Pueda!, just for a different audience and in a different media market.
As an actress, her body of work is smaller but not insignificant, from her early supporting role in Mi Recinto to her breakout lead performance in Sí se puede. It's a track record that suggests scripted work has always been part of her ambitions, even if hosting has been the more consistent thread running through her career.
Then there's the entrepreneurial side, which tends to get less attention but arguably says the most about how she's positioned herself for career longevity. Mundo Keto reflects a broader trend among television personalities: turning personal brand and audience trust into a standalone business rather than relying solely on network paychecks. Paired with her reality-show win alongside Beta Mejía and her sizable social media following, it paints a picture of someone who has treated her public profile as an asset to be built deliberately, not just a byproduct of being on TV.
Her personal life has also become part of the public narrative she navigates. She's the mother of a son, Sebastián Muñoz Jaramillo, and has spoken publicly about maintaining a good relationship with his father. Her current relationship with Beta Mejía has played out partly in public as well, including the two of them competing together on national television. For a public figure whose job depends on relatability, that kind of openness, whether by choice or by circumstance, has become part of the brand itself.
World Cup Fallout: How a Celebration Video Put Alejandra Jaramillo in the Crosshairs
Every long-running media career eventually collides with a moment that tests the goodwill it took years to build. For Jaramillo, that moment arrived in early July 2026, in the middle of the World Cup.
The chain of events started on June 30, 2026, when Mexico defeated Ecuador 2-0 in group-stage play, eliminating Jaramillo's home country from the tournament. Days later, on July 5, Mexico itself was eliminated in the round of sixteen, losing 3-2 to England in a tightly contested match. Jaramillo, watching the result land, filmed herself celebrating, jumping, cheering, and sharing the moment with friends on her Instagram stories, visibly delighted at Mexico's exit.
Given that she works for TelevisaUnivision, a network built substantially around Mexican and Mexican-American audiences, the reaction was immediate and pointed. Social media users accused her of mocking the very audience that supports her employer, and calls began circulating for the network to part ways with her. She eventually removed the celebratory video from her accounts, but not before it had already been screenshotted, reposted, and widely circulated, a familiar pattern in the social media age, where deletion rarely means disappearance.
Rather than issuing an apology, Jaramillo doubled down. She referenced an earlier moment where she'd playfully touched a Mexico jersey before the tournament, joking that she'd jinxed the team and simply "took a few extra days" for it to take effect. She also thanked England players Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham, jokingly claiming they had "Ecuadorian roots." When critics pushed back further, accusing her of poor sportsmanship, she defended herself publicly, arguing that outcomes in sports go both ways and that she had every right to celebrate results that favored the team she was rooting for. Her partner, Beta Mejía, attempted to de-escalate the situation by posting a message calling for unity through football, though Jaramillo herself maintained that she wouldn't let critics dictate how she expressed her emotions.
As of this writing, Jaramillo remains a panelist on ¡Siéntese Quien Pueda!, and TelevisaUnivision has not issued a public response to the calls for her removal. Whether the controversy fades quickly, as most social-media pile-ons eventually do, or leaves a lasting mark on her standing with a network built around the very audience she appeared to mock, remains to be seen. Either way, it's a reminder of how quickly a career built over twenty years of steady, well-liked television work can be complicated by a single unfiltered moment caught on camera.