Mexico’s retrograde path on the rule of law
López Obrador’s final reforms risk country’s future as a North American nation
The editorial board
Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president-elect, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is ramming through constitutional changes in his final months in office © Henry Romero/ReutersMexico is barrelling ahead with one of the world’s most radical shake-ups of a legal system, alarming investors and citizens alike.
In his final month in office, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is using his coalition’s congressional supermajority to ram through constitutional changes to change the entire supreme court and several thousand state, federal and appeal court judges with replacements elected by popular vote.
Candidates for some posts will need only a law degree, five years of undefined “legal experience” and a letter of recommendation from anyone in order to run.
Though some countries, including the US, elect some local or state judges, few invite voters to pick federal or supreme court justices.
Selecting top legal officials needs careful independent evaluation of their experience and qualifications, not their appeal to voters or the backing of a political party.
In a country like Mexico with a history of corruption and widespread drug violence, such a plan is especially risky.
The US, Mexico’s biggest foreign investor and trading partner, is raising the alarm; the US Chamber of Commerce says the changes risk undermining the rule of law.
Judges and court system employees have gone on strike in protest.
The peso has fallen around 15 per cent since Mexico’s June elections.
López Obrador has dismissed concerns as the lobbying of a corrupt, self-serving elite.
Both houses of congress have voted in favour of the legislation, which must now be ratified by a majority of the country’s 32 state legislatures.
They should reject the reforms because they will not address the impunity and corruption that bedevils Mexico’s legal system.
A reform of police and prosecutors would be a far better solution.
Concerns about Mexico’s direction run much deeper.
Since the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s, Mexico has steadily moved towards closer integration with the US and Canada.
That has not just been economic: Mexico also set up an independent electoral commission to establish faith in a voting system tarnished by fraud, a human rights commission to check abuses by security forces and arms-length regulators covering areas such as telecoms and competition.
Those entities helped give investors confidence that Mexico was converging with North American neighbours and moving away from an authoritarian past in which a single political party ruled for most of the 20th century.
López Obrador sees history differently.
For him, Mexico’s opening to trade and investment in the 1990s was the start of a “nightmare” period of neoliberalism and its “servile and pillaging” economic policy.
His replacement is the “Fourth Transformation”, a nationalist agenda for a state-dominated economy intended to improve the lot of the masses under the tutelage of his ever more powerful Morena party.
The promise that this would lead to greater prosperity has so far proved false: growth under López Obrador’s presidency will be Mexico’s lowest this century and the country is missing out on a big opportunity to lure manufacturing away from China.
Next month brings a new president but not a new ideology: Claudia Sheinbaum, López Obrador’s handpicked successor, is a willing supporter of his legal revolution, his fondness for handing more power to the military and his plans to emasculate Mexico’s young institutions.
Some investors see Sheinbaum as a modernising technocrat, though this is at odds with her past as a loyal party functionary and ideologue.
The president-elect still has time to rethink her party’s swerve away from North American values and institutions.
She should do so before investors start to reprice Mexico as a Central American economy.
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