Former president Enrique Peña Nieto suffered the indignity of being called a thief while leaving a luxury hotel in Rome with his girlfriend on Sunday.
A Twitter user who identifies herself as a tapatía, or native of Guadalajara, filmed the ex-president and Tania Ruiz, a Mexican model, as they left Hotel de la Ville in the Italian capital.
Twitter user @karenytv3 shouted “ratero” (thief) at Peña Nieto as he and Ruiz entered a taxi outside the hotel.
“The ratero is leaving now,” the woman said before she and another person mocked the ex-president for riding in a taxi.
The woman also predicted that Peña Nieto — who vanished from public life after leaving office in late 2018 and now reportedly lives in Spain — will end up in jail.
El ex presidente Enrique Peña Nieto subiéndose en taxi y celebrando el cumpleaños de su novia mientras le gritó que es un ratero y q se merece la cárcel. Que bueno q ni en Roma anda tan comodo y qué hay mexicanos exponiéndolo. Aunque bien que se queda en hotel de $2mil la noche pic.twitter.com/02hRVsSSmr
— Karen Y. TV3 (@karenytv3) October 24, 2021
“It’s good that he’s not even comfortable in Rome [because] there are Mexicans exposing him,” she wrote on Twitter.
“… I scream to him so many things, and he kept hiding from me like a coward,” she wrote in another post.
On Monday, she tweeted that she was surprised that her videos of Peña Nieto had gone viral.
“… I know that a president deserves respect, but we the citizens deserve respect as well. If he doesn’t want to be recognized, he should cover himself more and be more discreet. In the end, he’s a public figure,” she wrote.
Peña Nieto, who led a government plagued by corruption scandals, was apparently in Rome to celebrate Ruiz’s 34th birthday.
The ex-president is accused by fomer Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya of leading a bribery scheme that used money from the Brazilian company Odebrecht to buy lawmakers’ support for the previous federal government’s structural reforms, in particular the energy reform which opened up the sector to foreign and private companies after an almost 80-year state monopoly.
The newspaper Milenio reported last week that the federal Attorney General’s Office would seek to prosecute Peña Nieto on organized crime charges related to the Odebrecht case.
Asked about the latest footage of his predecessor on Monday, President López Obrador declined to comment. “I don’t get involved in that,” he told reporters at his regular news conference.
