Mexico's Senate just approved changing the constitution. Here's what you need to know

Mexico’s Senate on Wednesday narrowly passed sweeping changes to the courts that include having judges elected by the public rather than appointed, in a major and controversial set of constitutional reforms.

The approval came hours after hundreds of protesters broke into Mexico's Senate, forcing the body to take a temporary recess. The proposed reforms have led judges and other judicial staff to strike and protest, in what’s become one of Mexico’s biggest constitutional debates in years.

Here are the main things to understand about the reforms and why they are so controversial.

The government vows to root out court corruption

For nearly a year, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been promoting a plan to remake the federal judiciary and Claudia Sheinbaum, the president-elect, due to take over in October, backs the reforms. Both accuse the courts of gross corruption and say their changes are crucial.

The biggest proposal changes how federal judges are selected. Instead of working their way up the judiciary, the governing party wants them to be elected by popular vote. Like presidents and lawmakers, the governing party reasoned, judges from the Supreme Court on down to local courts will have to run for office.

The plan also includes reforms like making sure no judicial worker makes more than the president.

Mexico’s June elections handed Sheinbaum the victory and congressional supermajority needed to amend the Constitution.

López Obrador and his protege Sheinbaum say this will make the judiciary answer to the people instead of big business or organized crime.

After the lower house of Congress passed the reform 359-135, congressman Ricardo Monreal celebrated.

“We believe that we will end nepotism, corruption, influence peddling, the conflict of interest, the sale of justice to the highest bidder,” he said.

The judiciary is up in arms

Judges and judicial staff have been on strike since Aug. 19.

Last week, they formed picket lines in front of federal courthouses and just as the Mexican Congress was set to begin debating the measure, they surrounded the lower bodies’ headquarters in Mexico City to block the session.

“Democracy is in danger," José Fernando Migues Hernández, a Mexican judiciary worker, told NPR.

What’s more, federal courts had issued three injunctions in an attempt to stop the reforms.

But governing party lawmakers worked around the protesters and injunctions, saying they were an infringement of their constitutional rights, and they pressed on. Instead of meeting at Congress, they announced they would debate at a gym outside Mexico City. That’s where legislators from the lower house approved the raft of measures.

This has been tried before

Under its 1857 Constitution, Mexico actually used to elect its judges, according to Mónica Castillejos-Aragón, who clerked in Mexico's Supreme Court and now teaches comparative law at University of California, Berkeley.

When the framers of the current constitution, which was passed in 1917, discussed the judiciary they called electing judges an “inexplicable aberration.” They believed that elected judges led to corruption, so they reasoned that unlike the other two branches of government, the judiciary should be above politics.

“The framers expressed the need to establish an independent judicial power with security of tenure,” she says.

As the country took steps toward democracy in the 1990s, it also began appointing judges the way the United States does at the federal level. (Some U.S. states elect local judges.) And in the early 2000’s, nearly 80 years after it became independent on paper, the court finally began issuing landmark opinions.

“For the very first time in history, the Mexican judges were able to interpret and expand the scope of the rights already recognized in the Mexican Constitution,” Castillejos-Aragón says.

In recent years, the courts have struck down key policies of the president. For instance, in April 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Guard — a large paramilitary force created by President López Obrador to patrol the country — could not remain under military command.

Castillejos-Aragón says the new reforms might put in danger hard-fought independence that allowed the judiciary to check the presidency. She believes the current leadership is reacting to decisions like that National Guard ruling: The executive, now armed with a supermajority, wants to make sweeping changes without the courts getting in its way.

The only big democracy to elect judges at the federal level by popular vote is Bolivia, says Julio Ríos, who studies judiciaries at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. According to Ríos, the Bolivian reform, instituted in 2009, did diversify the courts but it did not make them any less corrupt. He says it just politicized the courts and weakened the public’s confidence in them.

However, according to constitutional lawyer Juan Carlos González Cancino, Mexico’s changes are necessary.

He says the federal judiciary is corrupt. Big tax cases or business cases get decided with a phone call or a bag of money, he says. In his mind, this is not about democracy. It's about factions of the Mexican elite fighting for power and the money that power begets.

“But that ends because this reform destroys that power structure,” he says.

Ultimately, he says, it doesn’t matter what the courts think about these reforms. The Mexican people spoke loud and clear when they handed the government the supermajority needed to reform the Constitution.

“The function of the judiciary should be to defend the popular will, as manifested by the constitution,” he says.

Copyright 2024, NPR

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