Last Crusade of Mexico’s President: A Drastic Redesign of the Judiciary

As Mexico’s president nears the end of his six-year term, his final mission is a sweeping redesign of the judiciary that he says is needed to fight corruption.

But in a potential turning point for Mexico’s democracy, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is facing a backlash from critics who say the move is a power grab aimed at eroding judicial independence and expanding the sway of his political movement.

The proposed changes would shift the judiciary from an appointment-based system largely grounded in training and qualifications to one where voters elect judges and there are few requirements to run. The move could potentially force more than 5,000 judges from their jobs, from the chief justice of the Supreme Court down to those at local district courts.

The judiciary rift in Mexico is the latest flashpoint in Mr. López Obrador’s tenure during which he has pushed for sweeping change that he argues will enhance governance, but critics warn could imperil the nation’s democracy and rule of law.

Thousands of judges and court workers around the country have gone on strike in protest, and the U.S. ambassador last week called Mr. López Obrador’s push in the final weeks of his six-year term “a major risk to the functioning of Mexico’s democracy,” provoking a diplomatic spat between the two nations over the wisdom of the proposals, and whether the United States should be weighing in at all.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the president-elect who takes office in October, has hit back at such criticism, including the labeling of elections as a risk to democracy, reflecting the consensus among Mr. López Obrador’s allies in favor of the overhaul. The determination to push through the measures has kept financial markets on edge, marked by a 13 percent plunge since early June in the value of the currency, the peso.

The contentious debate highlights the growing unease in Mexico over the prospect that Mr. López Obrador and his political party, Morena, are trying to lock in the political advantages they have now over a much longer period of time.

Norma Piña, who as chief justice of Mexico’s Supreme Court has been a frequent target of Mr. López Obrador’s ire, said the proposed changes were already sending a chill throughout the legal profession in Mexico. Asked whether the overhaul could be a matter of simple retribution, she did not rule such motivation out.

“I hope that’s not the case, because as a woman, a Mexican citizen, and a lawyer, this would be the worst thing that could happen to the country,” Ms. Piña said in an interview.

Lenia Batres, a justice on the Supreme Court and a top ally of Mr. López Obrador in the judiciary, brushed aside concerns over the proposed changes, arguing in an interview that they were needed because of a lack of “collaboration” between the judicial and executive branches.

“While one branch is thinking about building infrastructure, the other is sabotaging it,” Ms. Batres said, referring to court rulings that have thwarted some of Mr. López Obrador’s most ambitious plans, including measures favoring the state-owned electrical power company over private companies.

Even though Mr. López Obrador has enjoyed historically high approval ratings, he had little hope of pushing the judicial changes through Congress when he formally introduced them earlier this year.

But then his allies, including Ms. Sheinbaum, the president-elect, won landslide victories in the June general elections, reshaping Mexico’s political landscape.

After securing large legislative majorities, party leaders realized two things: They could obtain the votes needed to push through the proposals when the new Congress was seated in September, and then their supporters would be in a strong position to win judgeships in the newly created elections.

The party now has the judicial proposals at the top of the agenda for when the new Congress reconvenes next week.

The proposed judicial changes are already casting a pall over Mexico’s economy, which had benefited from a near-shoring boom in recent years as companies shifted manufacturing operations to Mexico from China, making Mexico the top trading partner of the United States.

Legal experts say there’s widespread fear about the effect the overhaul could have on the judicial impartiality needed to resolve disputes between the government and businesses. Concerns have grown that companies could place future investment plans on hold.

Before going public with his criticism of the judicial measures last week, Ken Salazar, the American ambassador, had long adopted a conciliatory approach to managing his relationship with Mr. López Obrador, sometimes siding with Mexico’s president in domestic disputes in an effort to preserve cooperation in areas like migration enforcement.

But such diplomatic posturing became untenable as resistance to the judicial overhaul coalesced among American investors, parts of the Biden administration and both Democratic and Republican members of the U.S. Congress, said Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, a political scientist at the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico.

“An opposing view emerged that is distinct from Ambassador Salazar’s betting everything on a friendship with President López Obrador,” Mr. Silva-Herzog Márquez said.

Ms. Sheinbaum has tried to ease concerns over the measures, pointing out that many states in the United States elect their judges. Others have noted that President Biden is proposing his own changes for the U.S. Supreme Court, calling for term limits and an enforceable code of ethics.

But Mr. Biden’s proposals are more modest in scale compared with Mr. López Obrador’s, argued José Ramón Cossío, a former justice on the high court. Mr. Biden is not calling for the entire federal judiciary or the Supreme Court to be elected.

Judicial experts, and many Mexican judges themselves, acknowledge that changes are needed to address corruption in Mexico’s legal system, especially at the local level. But they say the overhaul isn’t designed to address the deeper problems of graft nor the high levels of impunity for criminals, for which they say underfunded prosecutors and unprofessional police are more often to blame.

In addition to judicial elections, the measures would downsize the Supreme Court to nine justices from 11, shorten their terms to 12 years from 15 and create a Tribunal for Judicial Discipline, also elected by popular vote, with broad powers to investigate, sanction or possibly even fire or impeach judges and Supreme Court justices.

Some aspirants for judgeships, who often work for years as clerks or in other administrative positions in Mexico’s courts as they undergo training, are in a state of shock over having their career paths upended.

“It makes me so sad and frustrated to see that all that merit and sacrifice is no longer valued,” said Gabriela Medina, 40, a lawyer who worked for the last 14 years within the judicial system with the goal of becoming a federal judge. She took course after course, aced her exams and was expecting to be sworn in this summer, until the proposed overhaul suspended such ceremonies.

“Who is going to defend this country now?” she asked.

International legal experts say the changes could be a recipe for disaster, pointing to the recent example of Bolivia. Evo Morales, a former president, succeeded in having Bolivia’s high court judges and members of the Magistrates Council, a body that appoints and dismisses judges, elected from lists of candidates created by the national legislature.

Mr. Morales’s allies packed those lists with candidates sympathetic to his government, then used the courts to hound political opponents. That strategy seemed to work for Mr. Morales until 2019, when protests around claims of electoral fraud forced him to step down.

For his part, Mr. López Obrador has shown little hesitancy in attacking the judiciary and individual judges, often calling them out by name at his daily news conferences and blasting them over specific rulings. He has also tried to weaken other institutions, like the election agency that helped push the country away from the decades long one-party rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party — and which also has provided checks on the power of the Morena party.

His allies are also planning to push other far-reaching initiatives through Congress in the coming weeks. These include shutting down the government agency set up to uphold freedom of information laws and another agency designed to coordinate anti-corruption efforts at all three levels of government.

“This president does not believe that judges have the legitimacy to challenge him,” said Ana Laura Magaloni, one of Mexico’s top legal scholars.

But allies of the president, flexing their political muscle with large legislative majorities, are minimizing such concerns.

Mario Delgado Carrillo, a cabinet appointee in Ms. Sheinbaum’s incoming administration, said that legislators should approve the overhaul as a “great gift” for the departing Mr. López Obrador.

Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico City.