Mexican president’s plagiarism will hurt his country at critical time

(Photo: Rebecca Blackwell – AP)

The news that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto apparently plagiarized nearly 29 percent of his law school thesis couldn’t have come at a worse moment for Mexico. It will further weaken a president whose reputation is already tarnished by corruption scandals, at a time when his most important endeavor — Mexico’s education reform — is seriously threatened.

I don’t agree with some Mexican commentators who have minimized Peña Nieto’s plagiarism by painting it as a juvenile peccadillo, or tried to excuse it because it is a widespread practice among Mexican students, or who have criticized Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui, who runs the website Aristegui Noticias, for blowing the case out of proportion.

Aristegui and her investigative team did what journalists are supposed to do: expose what politicians want to hide from the public. If the report is true — and so far nobody has proven otherwise — the journalists deserve praise for their work.

According to the report, Peña Nieto plagiarized 197 of the 682 paragraphs of his 1991 law degree thesis on Mexico’s presidential system. It happened in 1991, when the current president was 25 years old and obtained his law degree at the Universidad Panamericana.

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