On June 26, Marika Kodua, a Facebook user, published a post with a photo in a public Facebook group called ?ემიგრანტებო?სამშობლოში? (?Emigrants?to the homeland?), in which she claimed that a Mexican MP took off his clothes in the Parliament to protest the poverty in the country. The post claimed that the MP addressed others with the following words:
“You are not even ashamed, when you see people in tatters in the streets. Nor are you ashamed when you are stealing their moneys [sic] from the budget, so why are you ashamed to look at me now?”
The photo was also being disseminated last year with nearly an identical description on social media, including the Russian Odnoklassniki. In October 2020, tvalsazrisi.ge shared a Facebook post with the similar information.
The widespread information is partially false. The Mexican MP indeed took off his clothes at a meeting, but the reason for the protest was the energy legal bill, introduced to the Parliament, not poverty.
The man on the photo is Antonio Garcia Conejo, a Mexican MP. He took off his clothes in the Mexican Congress of the Union in 2013 to protest a new legal bill on energy, which opened up state-controlled oil sector to foreign investments. The MP did not say the words, mentioned in the social media post, as his protest was not associated with poverty and corruption (stealing money from the budget).
BBC has also published video of the meeting.
According to the bill, drilling rights would be given to private oil and gas companies to extract oil and gas, in exchange for a share of the profits. The Congress adopted the given bill after the upper chamber had already adopted it.
Foreign pages have also disseminated the given photo on social media with the misleading description in 2020 as well. Fact-checking websites boomlive.in and Reuters have also published articles on this story.
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