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  • 2019-11-19 (xsd:date)
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  • Is This a Picture of 'El Chapo' and U.S. Democrats Plotting Open Borders? (en)
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  • An online tweet-turned-meme attempted to link then-U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke, and Mexican drug lord Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera (commonly known as El Chapo) in a plot to keep the USA/Mexico border open: Nothing implied or stated in this meme from January 2019 stands up to scrutiny, though. First off, the suggestion that the featured photograph captured some form of furtive meeting or secret negotiations between El Chapo and Democrats Pelosi and O'Rourke does not reflect reality. This picture was taken in May 2016 — while Guzmán was in custody in Mexico awaiting extradition to the United States — in conjunction with a tour of three Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership countries undertaken by a bipartisan U.S. House delegation. The man standing next to Pelosi is not El Chapo, but then-President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico: A better version of the photograph was contemporaneously posted to Facebook by U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, who was talking with Nieto at the time the picture was snapped (but was cropped out of the version used in the meme): It is true that another drug lord claimed during El Chapo's January 2019 trial that the latter had paid a bribe of $100 million to Nieto, but the alleged bribe was supposed to have been solicited to induce Nieto to call off the authorities' attempts to find and arrest El Chapo, not to keep the US/Mexico border open: Moreover, the bribe accusation against Nieto as related in court was both unproved and somewhat far-fetched: Finally, O'Rourke did not run a $70 million open borders campaign. His position on immigration has been to oppose the construction of a border-long wall (of the type U.S. President Donald Trump has called for) as an unnecessary and ineffective measure for improving border security, but not to advocate for open borders: Nieto left office in December 2018, and El Chapo was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years by a U.S. court in July 2019 and is currently serving his sentence at ADX Florence. (en)
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