Plan B Forum

Miami Politician Loses Herald Endorsement to Candidate "Abducted by Aliens"

From 1992 through 1998, Bruno Barreiro served in the Florida House of Representatives. From 1998 until this year, he was a Miami-Dade County commissioner.

In that time, Barreiro did such a remarkably poor job, was so universally reviled, and was so routinely ridiculed for being a dunce that the Miami Herald this weekend declined to endorse him in his race for central Miami's open congressional seat.

Instead, the Herald delivered ol' Bruno arguably the saddest blow in his political career: Instead of endorsing him, the newspaper's editorial board selected Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera, a candidate who stands by her claims that she was once abducted by aliens.

In 2009, Rodriguez Aguilera appeared on the Spanish-language program Experiencias Extradimensionales (Extradimensional Experiences), in which she said she zoomed around the universe with three giant, blond beings in a quartz-powered spaceship. She also said the aliens, who resembled Brazil's Christ the Redeemer statue, told her there are 30,000 "nonhuman" skulls hidden in Maltese caves, the "energy center" of the world exists in Africa, and South Miami-Dade's mysterious Coral Castle was built by aliens.

She stands by the experience. And the Herald endorsed her Sunday.

We realize that Rodriguez Aguilera is an unusual candidate. Last year, she told the Miami Herald — and several Spanish-language media outlets — that she believes in extra-terrestrials. She says when she was 7, she was taken aboard a spaceship and, throughout her life, she has communicated telepathically with the beings, which remind her of the concrete Christ in Brazil. There you have it.

“This is a non-issue,” she told the Board. We agree. Her bona fides as a former elected official, and now a businesswoman who spends time in other countries training women to run for office, are solid.

Yes, the question of whether a political candidate has a lucid, functioning brain is, indeed, a nonissue in the Herald's eyes! [A fair point] Other news outlets, including Newsweek and the Washington Post, are already poking fun at Miami's daily paper.

Bizarrely, the Herald did not endorse Maria Elvira Salazar, the former CNN, Univision, and Telemundo reporter who appears to be the race's Republican frontrunner. The Herald also passed over Angie Chirino, who has basically nothing to run on minus the fact she's the daughter of Cuban pop star Willy Chirino. Importantly, these two candidates do not claim they were kidnapped by extraterrestrials.