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Texan candidate lands in double trouble

Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday April 23, 2005
The Guardian

He walked like him. He waved like him. He even had the same haircut, and for the voters of the Texas town of San Antonio, the man standing in front of them looked like the mayoral candidate Julian Castro. There was only one problem. It wasn't him.

Mr Castro admitted yesterday that the man who had stood in his place on Monday night waving from the city council barge as part of the annual river parade had been his identical twin, Joaquin.

"We can't help that we look like each other," Julian Castro, a city council member, told the Associated Press, explaining he had another engagement elsewhere.

But the brothers insisted there had been no attempt at deception. "Every day I go out of my way to say it's me, it's not him," Joaquin said in a television interview yesterday.

"But that night we were floating along the river on a barge and folks were lining the river and the stands and it was impossible for them to hear you or you to hear them so I couldn't exactly yell out to them: 'Oh, it's Joaquin. It's not Julian'."

The public announcer who provided running commentary on the parade claimed he had been told that Julian, not Joaquin, was on the boat as expected. But Julian Castro said that was an oversight, and not deliberate.

"[Joaquin] told everyone on the barge that it was him but no one told the announcer to announce him instead of me," he said.

Mr Castro had been a frontrunner in the mayoral race, but his opponents have been quick to seize on the incident, immediately dubbed "Twinsgate".

One of them, Phil Hardberger, a state appeals court judge, said: "If you're 18 years old and having a date, it might be a youthful prank when you swap out your brother.

"But when you're running for mayor of a city with 1.3 million people and sending in your brother as an impersonator ... I do see a problem with it."

The two brothers insist that they will do everything possible from now on to avoid any misunderstanding.

Yesterday, they appeared on television with T-shirts, one saying "I am Julian" and the other "I am not Julian".

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1468400,00.html