Mexican President Peña Nieto Accused of Plagiarism in Thesis

Two decades later journalists discover he failed to properly reference almost a third part of the work

The President of Mexico has been the target of constant criticism since even before he took office in 2012, the subject of plenty of scandals, some more serious than others. From persistent corruption and crime during his term, to barely remembering the names of three of his favorite books, Pena Nieto has got caught in a lot of political, economic, and social controversy.

The latest incident involves the team of journalist Carmen Aristegui, a frequent critic of the president who published in 2014 another scathing report about the "Casa blanca" incident. They did some research on the President's thesis from 1991, and how they discovered Mr. Pena Nieto had practically plagiarized, supposedly, almost a third part of the work.

The thesis was called "El presidencialismo mexicano y Alvaro Obregon" (The Mexican Presidency and Alvaro Obregon) and consisted of 200 pages and 682 paragraphs. This document was approved by private Panamerican University.

Errors such as bad quoted phrases, style problems, and whole paragraphs without any attribution, were constant in the work, which concludes, in the eyes of the investigative reporters, that 25 year-old Enrique Pena Nieto plagiarized a great part of his thesis.

Here's a graph showing the results of every mistake he made on thesis chapters:

Most of the material was taken from a book written by Miguel De la Madrid Hurtado, former President of Mexico from 1982 to 1988, from which 20 identical paragraphs with no attribution were found in this academic work.

Example of one of the full copied paragraphs

Journalist Carmen Aristegui even posted a gif showing this document and explained every detail of the research in a special report, highlighting every mistake with detail.

President Peña Nieto's press department quickly put out a statement online responding to the report. Spokesman Eduardo Sanchez, said that it was very surprising for "style errors and missing references to be a matter of interest for journalists two and a half decades later."

Mexico's President, Enrique Pena Nieto, has already mentioned last week that he's not seeking to win medals for popularity.

About 28.8% of the content was plagiarized according to Aristegui, in which authors as Enrique Krauze, Linda Hall and some writings from the National Council for Educational Development back in 1985 were the "inspiration" to create this paper.

If you like to see the full video concerning this matter, watch it here

If you want to follow Aristegui's work, click here

via BBC and New York Times

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Translated by: cristina.mora@sandiegored.com

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