Mexico’s judicial reform plan: What is the controversy?

By Jorge Antonio Rocha

MEXICO CITY (AA) – For the past year, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has been pushing for radical constitutional reforms to overhaul a judiciary he accuses of corruption.

His move is gaining more steam since his Morena party won an overwhelming majority in parliament in the June 2 elections.

That has heightened concerns among analysts, who view it as an authoritarian move to further solidify the ruling party’s influence.

Lopez Obrador, who came to power in 2018 and will be succeeded by his ally Claudia Sheinbaum in October, has justified the reforms by pointing to what he says are instances of judges freeing criminals and favoring their political allies.

The plan has also rattled investors, leading to drops in financial markets and a weakening of the peso, but the president insists he will not “backtrack on reforming the rotten, corruption-ridden judiciary.”

For Javier Martin Reyes, a legal researcher at the Autonomous University of Mexico, the plan is one with “political purposes and motivations.”

One of the most contentious changes would be that judges will be elected by popular vote – candidates would be chosen by the president, Congress and Supreme Court, but voters will have the final say.

Reyes warned this would open judges to ideological or political bias. He pointed out that the president’s party currently holds a majority in both houses of Congress and governs 24 of the country’s 32 states, making it a hegemonic force.

"Obviously, a system of popular election … would favor the ruling party,” he told Anadolu.

“Only people close to Morena would reach the judiciary and would not be impartial as they are meant to be.”

- The Bolivian case

In the Americas, only Bolivia has ever done something like the reforms Mexico could soon implement.

When former leftist President Evo Morales took power in 2006, his government implemented radical reforms in various sectors, including the economy, political system and the judiciary.

Morales launched a campaign against the judiciary, which he said was a corrupt entity serving the powerful. By 2011, he had successfully implemented his reforms, including judges being elected by direct voting.

“It has been a hard blow to the rule of law and to institutional democracy,” Jose Antonio Rivera Santibanez, a former justice of Bolivia’s Constitutional Court, told Anadolu.

“It has resulted in the judicial branch as a whole being subordinate to political power, to those who hold that power.”

It gave people the chance to “instrumentalize the judiciary for political purposes or to persecute those who hold a position contrary to their own,” said Santibanez, a constitutional law professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Simon in Bolivia.

He said Morales’ allies and followers cemented their power within the judiciary, turning it into a tool for the ruling party.

“Today, the judicial system is going through a structural crisis, characterized by a chronic delay of justice, high rates of corruption, a total lack of independence and impartiality … systematic violation of the right of access to justice and poor quality of service,” he said.

- Why now in Mexico?

Another indicator of Lopez Obrador’s political motives with the reforms is the timing, according to Reyes.

“Why didn’t President Lopez Obrador propose a reform like this for more than five years of his tenure?” he said.

“The answer is very simple; because he had his own proxy, a politician in a robe disguised as a constitutional judge, Arturo Zaldivar,” he said, referring to the former head of Mexico’s Supreme Court, who had close ties with the president and is now part of incoming leader Sheinbaum’s team.

Lopez Obrador’s relations with the judiciary soured after Zaldivar was replaced by Norma Pina as president of the Supreme Court in 2023, he said.

Since then, the Supreme Court has resisted Lopez Obrador’s moves on more than one occasion, such as when it ruled against the decision to attach the National Guard, a civilian body, to the Mexican military.

These reforms are a plot to “politically capture the judiciary because it is one of the last institutional counterweights,” said Reyes, reiterating that they should be viewed “as an attempt to capture, weaken and subordinate the court.”