Politics

Plagiarism? Hey, You Try To Write 200 Pages On Álvaro Obregón, Buddy!

Did Mexico's president cheat on his thesis?

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(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

President Enrique Peña Nieto, who ranked just a shade ahead of Bill Clinton on this list of the world’s most powerful lawyers, has watched his tenure as president of Mexico get away from him faster than El Chapo leaves one of Peña Nieto’s prisons.

Even before his election, The Guardian published a report that Mexican media manipulated coverage for cash to favor his party, which is the sort of media disgrace that should be more important than Kardashians selling beauty products, but somehow isn’t. Then his wife and China and bullet trains all got mixed up in a multi-million dollar property scandal.

And then there’s the inevitable fallout from when he has to pay for Donald Trump’s wall.

Now comes word that almost one-third of his law thesis may have been plagiarized, marking the first time anyone’s accused Mexico of producing a cheap knock-off product. According to Reuters:

Of the 682 paragraphs that made up the 200-page thesis, titled ‘Mexican Presidentialism and Alvaro Obregon,’ 197, or 28.9 percent, were found to be plagiarized, the report said.

It’s a law thesis — there was sure to be some boilerplate in there. I mean, how much can one say about Obregón’s betrayal of his own roots in putting down the Yaqui rebellion of 1926-27? Am I right?

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Well, the administration is sloughing off the nearly 30 percent of alleged plagiarism as “style errors.” Ah.

In any event, if the plagiarizing is true, at least Peña Nieto joins some good company among international heavies. As the Washington Post notes, Putin’s thesis was a veritable textbook on the subject… indeed, it appeared to mostly BE a textbook on the subject:

In 2005, two researchers at the Brookings Institution in Washington got a copy of the thesis, titled “Strategic Planning of the Reproduction of the Mineral Resource Base of a Region under Conditions of the Formation of Market Relations,” and presented their findings in 2006. Researchers Clifford Gaddy and Igor Danchenko found that the thesis had been heavily “borrowed” from a 1978 textbook, “Strategic Planning and Public Policy,” written by University of Pittsburgh Professors David I. Cleland and William R. King.

Perhaps Peña Nieto will take a lesson on dealing with these criticisms from Putin. Belize is just sitting right there like a little Crimea.

Mexican president Pena Nieto plagiarized law thesis, report says [Reuters]

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