Minister Yasmín Esquivel, one of the 11 members of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) and who aspires to preside over it from January, rejected on Wednesday that she had committed plagiarism in her undergraduate thesis, as the writer Guillermo Sheridan accused in an article published in the Latinus news portal.
Esquivel posted on Twitter the message “Totally false the report of Latinus. Now what else are they going to invent?”, accompanied by the image of a trade of Professor Martha Rodríguez Ortíz, who was his thesis director and denies that the document has been plagiarized.
Latinus’ report is totally false. Now what else are they going to invent? pic.twitter.com/so37Vz2a92
— Yasmin Esquivel Mossa (@YasminEsquivel_) December 21, 2022
Hours earlier, the Latinus portal published Sheridan’s article “A minister intern: Yasmín Esquivel, candidate to preside over the SCJN, plagiarized her bachelor’s thesis.”
In it, Sheridan shows the cover and other fragments of Esquivel’s thesis, prepared in 1987 to graduate in Law from the National School of Professional Studies (ENEP, today Faculty of Higher Studies, FES), Aragon campus, belonging to the UNAM.
Sheridan compares images of that document and the thesis of Edgar Ulises Báez Gutiérrez, written a year earlier, in 1986, to graduate from the Faculty of Law of the UNAM, and accuses that the current minister committed fraud.
“The plagiarized thesis is to such a multiplying degree that it remains only to assume that the thesis director Rodríguez Ortíz and the intern Esquivel Mossa acted in common agreement in the elaboration of the fraud,” he says.
In the letter of Rodríguez Ortíz that the minister published in response, the professor says that she certifies that the thesis that Esquivel made is original. As an argument, he states that he has directed more than 500 undergraduate theses in 45 years as a university professor.
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The confrontation between Esquivel and Sheridan comes a week and a half after the full Court sits to define who will occupy the presidency instead of Minister Arturo Zaldivar. In addition to Esquivel, Norma Piña, Alfredo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena, Javier Laynez and Alberto Pérez Dayán aspire to the position.
The president of the Court also heads the Council of the Federal Judiciary (CJF), the organ of the Judicial Branch that administers the courts and tribunals and monitors the conduct of judges and magistrates.
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