He may look like President Rodrigo Duterte, but he’s most definitely not. Aica Ganhinhin should know, a photo that keeps cropping up in the unlikeliest places online is actually her grandfather, and this isn’t the first time she’s had to straighten people out on the matter.
This past weekend it was the Duterte Diehard Supporters (DDS), the president’s troop of online loyalists, who she had to take to task for mistakenly using her grandpa’s pic in a post that appeared in a Facebook group on Saturday.
Ganhinhin called them out in the comments, writing: “What’s wrong with you DDS? You don’t recognize your own idol. That’s my grandfather.”
Despite the seeming bite of her online remarks, she also said she’s not offended that the group misidentified her grandfather’s photo. In fact, she thinks it’s kind of hilarious. And so does her grandfather, she added.
Ganhinhin was responding to a viral post that appeared on a group named Duterte Para sa Bayan (“Duterte for the country”). The photo showed an elderly man at a roadside eatery wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Judging by the comments, the page’s followers certainly believed the man was Duterte.
But the man in question, Ganhinhin insists, is actually Ricarte Erese, her grandfather. To prove her point, she also posted a photo of her along with Erese. There’s no doubt about it — the similarity between Duterte and Erese is uncanny.
As of publication, Erese’s photo in the DDS group has been shared almost 1,900 times.
In an interview with Coconuts Manila, Ganhinhin said this is far from the first time people have mistaken her grandfather for the president.
“He’s actually quite used to having his photo taken with strangers who have noticed that he looks like the president,” she said.
“Actually, I saw that [photo] even before it became viral. I was just scrolling on my feed when I saw his face…. When I saw where it was posted, [and] I checked the comments, that’s when I laughed so hard.”
Of all the enthusiastic expressions of Duterte support that DDS offered upon the erroneous post, our favorite might be the gushing over how down-to-earth the president was for eating at a humble roadside restaurant. Almost none of them doubted the man in the photo was the president.
Have you come across any Duterte doppelgängers of your own? Tell us by leaving a comment below or tweeting to @CoconutsManila.
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