Twitter Destroys Enrique Peña Nieto After Learning He Plagiarized 29% of His Law School Thesis

Over the weekend, Aristegui Noticias broke the news that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto plagiarized a significant chunk of his 1991 undergraduate law thesis. In a piece titled “Peña Nieto, de plagiador a presidente,” Carmen Aristegui and the same group that brought EPN and first lady Angelica Rivera’s Casa Blanca scandal to light shared that in his thesis, he stole from at least 10 different writers. Specialists and academics looked into a large sample size of his work, and found that he either entirely plagiarized or poorly sourced at least 197 of the 682 paragraphs (28.8 percent).

His thesis copied about 20 paragraphs from former President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado’s Estudios de Derecho Constitucional. “But he never mentions the former president in his text,” Aristegui Noticia notes. “Nothing. Enrique Peña Nieto used the words and the ideas of the man who preceded him as president as if they were his own.”

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EPN talked about Álvaro Obregón through 36 paragraphs, but researchers found that only one wasn’t plagiarized. Mostly, he took his information from Alberto Morales Jiménez’s Hombres de la Revolución Mexicana and Así fue la Revolución Mexicana. Though EPN did reference these works, he didn’t make it clear just how much he used the pieces to inform his thesis.

According to Reuters, government spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said that EPN didn’t so much plagiarize as he did commit “style errors.” Sanchez added that Peña Nieto met all the other requirements to receive a law degree from Universidad Panamericana. The news comes at a time when his controversial 2013 reform educativa has once again taken center stage. The reform aims to end the teachers schools that have helped those who come from lower-income families become educators. Instead of graduating from these schools, teachers would just need to earn a college degree in any subject and pass a test – a method that would shut out many people from this career. Just a month ago – after the death of eight Oaxaca educators and growing scrutiny – EPN agreed to open a dialogue around his education reform.

So with EPN dominating conversation on Twitter, people have wondered how someone who didn’t get through school honestly could be tasked with trying to maintain order in the country’s educational system. Mostly, Twitter isn’t the place for EPN right now, unless he wants to see himself get endlessly dragged. Check out a few A+ responses below: