Latin America's drug war has long been a byword for ugliness: a macho, brutal world where grim-faced soldiers battled ruthless narco-traffickers in jungles and slums.

In such a world, Jessica Anne Jordan Burton cuts a somewhat incongruous figure. The 26-year-old British-born former model and beauty queen has become a controversial figurehead in Bolivia's increasingly fraught campaign against cocaine barons.

It is far from clear that this is a battle she is winning, but there is no doubting her courage. President Evo Morales, a socialist Aymara Indian, has appointed the former Miss Bolivia, who has not held previous public office, to be his viceroy in Beni, a remote and volatile drug-infested province.

"Drugs are a problem. Trafficking is a problem. Corruption is a problem. Poverty is a problem. So I feel I have a mission," Jordan told the Observer last week, after a few weeks in the job. "I am taking this post very seriously and I love it. I feel I am in my place."

She accepted the possibility of assassination that came with the job. "My life is always at risk. There's only one life and I think we have to work the best we can to leave something behind."

Jordan, born in Bath, Somerset, to a British engineer and Bolivian mother, moved to Bolivia as a young girl after her parents divorced. She said she would crack down on illegal logging and gold mining as well as drugs. "I'd like to change the image of Beni as a pirate, trafficking area. It is time for this region to grow as we always dreamed."

The appointment, which astonished Bolivia, has turned the spotlight on the country's faltering effort to rein in drug traffickers amid grim tidings from the rest of the region. The official death toll from Mexico's four-year crackdown has jumped to 28,000, prompting talk of once unthinkable measures such as legalising marijuana. Despite a US-backed military campaign, Colombia remains the world's biggest producer of cocaine. Remnants of the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru ramped up production of coca leaves, cocaine's raw ingredient, to 119,000 tonnes last year.

The picture in Bolivia is also bleak. UN and US officials estimate that 30,000 hectares of illegal coca is now being cultivated. Authorities have seized more than 18 tonnes of cocaine this year but that is believed to be a small fraction of what is being shipped to Brazil and Europe, reportedly making cocaine Bolivia's third main revenue source after gas and mining.

"There are a lot of very experienced foreign drug traffickers and producers based here now," said Bolivia's anti-drugs chief, Felipe Cáceres. "With the Colombians bringing down their methods, producers can produce much more [cocaine] paste with less coca. They have much more sophisticated methods."

Local gangs had forged ties with Mexico's Zeta cartel and two Brazilian networks, First Capital Command and Comando Vermelho, said Cáceres. "But we are not going to let Bolivia be trapped into a Colombia or Mexico-like scenario."

Valentín Mejillones, an Aymara priest who blessed Morales at a presidential inauguration ceremony, was recently arrested alongside two Colombians with a 240kg stash of liquid cocaine. It was an embarrassing blow to the leftwing president. A former coca farmer himself, he expelled US drug agents two years ago, saying he could achieve a "zero cocaine" policy by allowing farmers to grow the crop for medicinal and cultural uses, but recently acknowledged his experiment – a bold departure from US-led eradication policies – was in trouble.

Critics scorned Jordan as lightweight eye-candy, but Miguel Angel Ruiz, a congressman for Beni who belongs to the president's Socialist party, defended the appointment as part of a broader strategy. "The borders in Beni were forgotten, neglected. Now Evo Morales has created an agency at national and regional levels to try to stop drug trafficking and smuggling once and for all. And Jessica's role at a regional level is key in this."

Jordan, speaking to the Observer from the town of Trinidad during a tour of the province, said she always had a social conscience and had planned to use modelling as a springboard for politics.

Her current job was created after she narrowly lost an election for governor – Morales asked her three times to run – in a contested election.

"People were saying, 'Jessica has no experience', and I was saying where is the experience of the people who have been running Beni for so long that we don't have basic services?

"People in politics here are always out for their own gain. I am now working for my region and for my country." She accepted comparisons with Cinderella in reverse: born into privilege, educated in Miami, holidays in Sardinia – and now trekking through muddy wilderness to build schools and roads.

Her looks, she said, were no longer relevant. "The physical thing doesn't really matter. I have already proved I can do the job."