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The Hypocrisy Behind Mexico’s President, Enrique Peña Nieto

With tensions rising in the United States and Trump’s presidency, many immigrants live in fear for their lives as hundreds and hundreds of them get deported to their homelands ever day. Fear is circulating around in a disastrous cycle, and many don’t know how to defuse such a high stress situation. But with this video surfacing around the internet, Mexico’s President Peña Nieto seems to have the answer to all of our problems.

In the video, Peña Nieto is shown saying,“Let the government help you in this process of returning to your country.” He further adds that the country’s doors will alway be open, in terms of directing assistance to the Mexican people from the federal government. But with the continuous lies and false sense of security Peña Nieto has been spouting for five years and counting, how much more of this hypocrisy can we take?

When Enrique Peña Nieto became the President of Mexico in 2012, he vowed to eliminate most of all drug cartels and all the corruption that drenched the Mexican community. But rather than galvanizing change in the country and inspiring infrastructure, all Peña Nieto has inspired are controversies and scandals that have only worsened matters in Mexico. In fact, I’m not the only one who thinks his hot scandals are tarnishing the trust of the Mexican people. Polls by the Reforma Newspaper have concluded that the approval rate of his presidency have plummeted into a total of 12%, and is apparently the lowest presidential approval in decades, according to a report by the Zeta Tijuana.

Why you say, the people have lost so much trust in him? Well, let’s go back to the very beginning of his political career. When Peña Nieto was a mere baby in the presidential nominees for Mexico in 2011, he was asked of which three books influenced the most. Peña Nieto responded with fumbled authors names and titles, and even asked help from the audience on recalling an author’s name, but later mismatching the two names. (I suppose you could say he really pulled a Rick Perry on that one) Later, he finally came up with a title he was really influenced by, which being The Bible, but made sure to tell us that he only ‘read parts of it’.

Some would say that this was an honest mistake, and some people were left a tad shaky. It wasn’t until afterwords Peña Nieto won the Mexican presidency and a report came out by the Aristegui Noticias that Peña Nieto had plagiarized most all of his law school thesis. Almost 29% of his entire writing was stolen from other authors, one of them being ex-president Miguel de la Madrid. All of these secrets of his being exhumed like lottery numbers are something that have already past the line of ‘not fit for president’.

We can further down the list of why Peña Nieto is so unpopular, but perhaps this twisted reason could really set in the unlikeliness of Peña Nieto. On September 26, 2014, 43 students from the rural city of Ayotzinapa went missing after being confronted with local police. This case went so widely known because for some reason it seemed to cast a silent spell on the Mexican Government, specifically the Peña Nieto administration. Protestors took their rage and fury to the streets, reiterating that this case was a perfect example on how such gruesome and grisly murders often go unsolved, and justice is never served. This not only set more attention to the amount of growing corruption going on in the local police precincts in Mexico, but also the lack of care towards basic human rights that the Mexican Government can at times, coincidentally forget about.

People protesting the disappearance of the 43 students in Ayotzinapa.

To add more stain to the truth, the protestors were right on the dot. According to the National Registry or Disappeared People, at least 13,156 people have disappeared under the bare three years of Peña Nieto’s presidency. Where was that ‘immediate’ change that Peña Nieto promised us would happen in a year? To give you the ending of this tragic story that you’re all hoping for, I’ll give it to you, but not in the way you expect. Six months after the disappearance of these 43 students, the Attorney General (Jesus Murillo Karam) released a public explanation of what they believed happened. The public explanation said that the government believed that the bodies were killed, burned, and thrown away in a dump in Cocula. However, a team of international forensic experts challenged this released ‘truth’ and explained how this was scientifically impossible, based on the remains of the bodies. From this point on, the Peña Nieto administration were so embarrassed that no word was uttered to the public until they reopened the case on October 2015. No news has come out, and justice still hasn’t been served.

The point being is that, the Mexican people have every right to flee to a country where they see safety. For Peña Nieto to welcome immigrants back to Mexico, provide clothing, water, food, and transportation, is a huge disrespect to the Mexican people and society. Peña Nieto has done nothing but sit on his presidential throne and watch the thousands of Mexican lives being disappeared each day. It is hypocrisy, disrespect, and simply a clear message to Mexican society that their human rights and lives are nothing but a deluded thought wired into their heads.

We as immigrants, Mexican citizens and heartfelt people of the Mexican society, need to stand against this hatred and continue to fight for our rights. We are not undocumented, we are not property. We are humans who rightfully belong to their rights.

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