Meet your new neighbors: the Gadaffis!
In a plot foiled by the Mexican government, the dictator’s playboy son Saadi Gaddafi, 38, planned to smuggle his family into the country, with the intention of settling in the beach resort of Punta Mita, just north of Puerto Vallarta.
An exclusive, upmarket peninsula, home to a Four Seasons resort and private villas, Punta Mita is best known for attracting celebrity visitors such as Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Aniston and Lady Gaga. It is also reportedly home to a multi-million-dollar estate that was awaiting members of the Gaddafi clan.
The story was first broken by Canada’s National Post on October 29 and Mexican authorities confirmed on Wednesday that they had foiled the plan in September.
The United Nations had frozen Gaddafi’s assets and banned him from international travel because of his close ties to the Libyan dictatorship, but according to the Post, Canadian company “Can/Aust Security and Investigations International” approached private security contractors in Ontario, offering 1,000 dollars per day to transport Gaddafi and his wife and children from Libya to the Punta Mita property.
The plot was allegedly led by Canadian Cynthia Vanier, and involved two Mexicans and a Dane, all of whom were arrested in Mexico City on November 10 and 11.
The U.S. government congratulated its Mexican counterpart on Wednesday for preventing Gaddafi and his family from settling south of the border. State Department spokesman Mark Toner described it as “good work” and said it “was a case of national security for Mexico.”
Libya’s deposed dictator Colonel Gaddafi was killed by rebel forces on October 20. Among his eight children, Saif al-Islam was caught last month and faces trial before the International Criminal Court, while three others are dead and three fled to neighboring Algeria.
Saadi Gaddafi and his family remain at large. A former member of Libya’s special forces and an active businessman, Saadi was famed for his playboy lifestyle and even played professional soccer for Perugia in Italy’s Serie A League.
Pulsamerica: Peña Nieto vs Vazquez Mota
More on the aforementioned incidents: the latest blog in a series I’ve been doing for Pulsamerica, with a little more personal insight on my impressions of Peña Nieto and Vazquez Mota at the FIL.
Hacking Away: Should presidential hopefuls think harder about their reading lists?
Attending Guadalajara’s 25th Feria Internacional del Libro (International Book Fair – FIL) last week, I witnessed speeches by the two candidates most likely to win next July’s presidential election.
The first was Josefina Vázquez Mota, favourite to win the nomination of the incumbent Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party – PAN) and become the first female presidential candidate from a major party in Mexico’s history.
The second was Enrique Peña Nieto, a clear frontrunner in the polls and the only candidate so far registered to represent the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party – PRI), a resurgent force that ruled Mexico under an iron fist for 71 years until the turn of the century.
Now I’m by no means a fan of either party, but in terms of charisma and speechmaking ability, one candidate stood head and shoulders above the other. And it was not the one most people consider a shoe-in for the presidency.
Peña Nieto gave a speech that would have left a convention of insomniacs snoring, while Vázquez Mota at least managed to speak with a bit of conviction, throwing in a bit of feminism, anecdotes about meeting the likes of Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Bachelet and Alvaro Uribe, and even the odd joke.
Peña Nieto, on the other hand, was confident and authoritative, without ever being interesting. He has hands right out of the Tony Blair School of Impassioned Body Language, and the air of a man who already knows he will be the next president. But he was still incredibly dull.
But that does not necessarily mean he is a bad politican — or that he would make a bad leader — and most likely it will not matter a jot come election day.
Peña Nieto has many things going for him: he’s handsome; he has a pretty celebrity wife; he’s young enough to not look like a member of the bad, ‘old’ PRI; he has the backing of influential media giant Televisa; and, conveniently, President Felipe Calderon’s disastrous war on the nation’s cartels has eroded most of the PAN’s national support.
However, critics say he is vapid; all style and no substance. He can stand there looking photogenic and answering pre-rehearsed questions but he knows not what to do when forced to go off script by an impartial media.
This was proven to some extent when he was asked in the FIL press conference to name three books that have influenced his life.
Flustered, Peña Nieto vaguely cited “some parts” of the bible, erroneously attributed Carlos Fuentes’ ‘La silla del águila’ to Enrique Krauze, and failed to recall the name of a third book of his choice. He then struggled to remember the title or author of the book he is currently reading, before desperately grasping for a Jeffrey Archer novel without a hint of irony.
Despite alleged attempts at online censorship, the gaffe soon went viral. Throw in a sneering, classist tweet from Peña Nieto’s 16-year-old daughter deriding his critics as “proles” and “jealous assholes”, and his first campaign crisis was complete.
Peña Nieto’s attempts to laugh it all off failed and he found himself forced to apologise as an online storm picked up pace.
All this over a fairly trivial slip-up that will surely be forgotten by the time Mexicans go to the polls.
It is unlikely to cause him much harm in the long-run, and Peña Nieto remains firm favourite to win the presidency, but the incident offers perhaps the first chink in the ‘new’ PRI’s armour.
Vázquez Mota and leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador will have been sure to take note.
Twitter lockdown as Peña Nieto book gaffe goes viral
The second, more prominent and more boring of the two presidential candidates I saw at the FIL was Enrique Peña Nieto. Nothing he said in his speech was interesting enough to bother mentioning, so instead the story is all about a rather high-profile error he made in the subsequent Q&A:
In a press conference after delivering the keynote address at the International Meeting on Democratic Culture, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) politician stumbled when asked to name three books that have influenced his life.
Seemingly panicked at having to go off-script, Peña Nieto vaguely cited “some parts” of the Bible, before erroneously attributing Carlos Fuentes’ “La silla del águila” to Enrique Krauze, and failing to recall the name of a third book of his choice. The 45-year-old politician struggled to remember the title or author of the book he is currently reading and also made reference to a novel by Jeffrey Archer, a conservative politician from Britain who once served time in prison for perjury and conspiracy to pervert justice.
Following this embarrassing episode, the candidate’s 16-year-old daughter Paulina Peña Nieto stirred a virtual hornet’s nest by slamming her father’s critics as “jealous assholes” and “proles,” on social networking site Twitter.
The message, which Paulina (@Pau_95Pena) seemingly endorsed by “re-tweeting,” was originally sent from her boyfriend’s account (@JojoTorre). Both accounts were soon deactivated, but only after thousands of users had condemned the comments as classist and offensive.
On Monday #soyprole (“I’m a prole”) was still Twitter’s top trending topic in Mexico, while seven of the ten most discussed topics in the country related to Peña Nieto’s appearance at the FIL two days earlier.
The aftermath of the incident also raised concern over online censorship. Under the hashtag #LibreriaPenaNieto (“Peña Nieto library”), the issue had quickly become the most talked about on Twitter – until the category was suddenly deleted from the micro-blogging site.
Accusations of censorship continued to circulate when, as more viewers watched a YouTube video of Peña Nieto’s gaffe, the page’s hit counter began to drop instead of rising. Proceso journalist Jenaro Villamil also said his “Homozapping” blog was hacked after he used it to spread news of the incident.
In an attempt to diffuse the situation on Sunday evening, Peña Nieto (@EPN) posted on his official Twitter account, “I’m reading tweets about my mistake yesterday, some very critical, others funny. Thanks everyone. We will continue working for Mexico.”
The next morning he added, “a core value of democracy is freedom of expression. The criticism of those who hold public office or aspire to do so is essential.”
Paulina then reactivated her account on Monday, tweeting, “I apologize wholeheartedly. My intention with the RT (re-tweet) was never to offend. I admit I did wrong and I regret it … It was an impulse for me upon reading some tweets that were offensive towards my dad and my mom’s memory. Today I learned a great lesson.”
With the row refusing to die down, Peña Nieto also found himself forced to apologize for his daughter’s actions, posting, “The RT of Paulina was an emotional reaction to my mistake in the FIL. It definitely went too far and I apologize publicly for that.”
He added, “I talked to my kids about the value of respect and tolerance, I reiterated to them that we must listen to others and not offend them.”
Analysts predict the fallout from the incident could hurt Peña Nieto’s standing, although with over six months to go until the election it seems likely to be forgotten by the time voters go to the polls.
As footage of Peña Nieto’s slip-up went viral, many of his rivals and critics sought to capitalize on it. Jesus Zambrano, national president of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) said Peña Nieto was a victim of the ignorance promoted by the neoliberal policies of the PRI and the ruling party.
National Action Party (PAN) politician Xochitl Galvez Ruiz tweeted, “This is what happens when money and image are placed above talent in politics,” while journalist Jorge Volpi wrote, “The candidates ‘write’ books and go to the FIL: mere campaigning acts that fail to hide their contempt for those who read and write.”
Amid the rush to criticize Peña Nieto, one opportunistic politician merely ended up embarrassing himself. In an interview with Radio Red, Ernesto Cordero, who hopes to win the presidential nomination of the incumbent PAN, said “we all have serious doubts” about the candidacy of Peña Nieto.
But when asked about his favorite books, Cordero mentioned, “Alice in Wonderland,” George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” and “La Isla de la Pasión,” which he claimed was written by Isabel Restrepo. Cordero was then roundly mocked online upon being informed that the author’s name was in fact Laura Restrepo.
The entire episode circulated relentlessly across Facebook and Twitter this week, with many Mexicans commenting that when major candidates from the two biggest political parties cannot name three books without erring, this offers some reflection of the quality of politicians on offer.
To round off a top, top week for Peña Nieto, he made the top trending topic in Twitter again last night, even when the football league final was on. This time he was trending as #EPNTieneMasSeguidoresFalsosQue (Peña Nieto has more fake followers than…) after it became clear that many of his 170,000 followers are bots with generic avatars, no followers and no followings – presumably created to make EPN look more popular.
Don’t want to seem like a conspiracy nut here, but just as I was typing this, “PRD a la Presidencia de la Republica” (PRD to the Presidency of the Republic) disappeared from being top trending topic to not on the list at all in a matter of seconds. More evidence of online censorship or am I just going mad? Probably the latter, yes.
The Tequila Files 