Mexican official's daughter has inspectors shut down restaurant after not getting her table (W/Pics)

Young_Chitlin · April 2013

By ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORTER

A Mexican official's daughter has caused a scandal by sending inspectors to shut down a restaurant that didn't give her the table she wanted. It's the latest of several cases of seeming arrogance by the wealthy and well-connected that have caused anger recently in a country with deep class divisions. Many people say string-pulling and influence-wielding are all too common in Mexico, where arguments with politicians' relatives often end with the threatening phrase, 'You don't know who you're messing with.'

The difference now is that with social media, such incidents go viral and force immediate reaction. 'As a society, we are fed up with, disgusted with this,' said writer Guadalupe Loaeza. 'This is an attitude of the past; it doesn't fit with the times.' The government said Monday it has launched an investigation into the incident over the weekend at the Maximo Bistrot in Mexico City's trendy Roma Norte neighborhood.

Andrea Benitez, the daughter of the federal attorney general for consumer protection, Humberto Benitez Trevino, went to the restaurant and apparently didn't get the table she wanted or had been promised. Just hours after the incident, inspectors showed up with official 'suspended' signs to punish the restaurant. Benitez Trevino issued a statement apologizing for 'the inappropriate behavior of my daughter Andrea.' While he didn't explicitly say his daughter sicced the inspectors on the eatery, his apology implied she did.

'She exaggerated the situation and the officials of the Attorney General's Office for Consumer Protection, which I head, overreacted because it was my daughter,' he wrote. 'Immediately upon hearing of the situation, I ordered the raid (on the restaurant) suspended, to avoid any excesses.' The Economy Department, which oversees Benitez Trevino's office, said President Enrique Pena Nieto had ordered the federal comptroller's office to open an investigation into the case.

The restaurant was able to open for business on Sunday, and Benitez Trevino's office said the inspectors had suspended only two of the bistro's permits: one governing reservations and one covering liquor sales, because volume contents of bottles were not appropriately listed. Pena Nieto has to be particularly careful about such incidents since his Institutional Revolutionary Party, which regained power last year after 12 years out of the presidency, had become infamous during its 1929-2000 rule for breeding an extended clan of arrogant, inexplicably wealthy politicians known as the 'Revolutionary Family.'

In the latest case, diners at the restaurant photographed the inspectors' raid and posted comments on social media sites. Andrea Benitez found herself a trending topic on Twitter with her own hashtag and thousands of negative tweets. 'Just look at Pena Nieto's daughters, and what a low profile they keep. They're not out in public anymore,' Loaeza noted. 'Mexican society is not going to put up with this anymore. Now people complain, now it becomes a scandal.'