AMLO Leaves Little to Chance in Quest to Overhaul Mexico’s Judiciary

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(Bloomberg) — Nationwide strikes. Fierce warnings from the US that democracy is at risk. Backlash from investors that has caused the currency to plummet. None of it has quelled President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s desire to push through a controversial plan that would require the election of Mexico’s federal judges. 

But the president known as AMLO is in fact pulling out all the stops to ensure the success of his long quest to overhaul the judiciary. Earlier this month, leaders of his Morena party kicked off their push to approve the reform before he leaves office at the end of September, unveiling legislation that calls for the start of judicial elections in 2025.

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With a key congressional committee set to weigh the plan Monday, opponents are pointing to a subtle change in the sweeping proposal as evidence of AMLO’s win-at-all-costs strategy. The tweak puts electoral judges in a group that won’t face a vote until 2027 — a reprieve for the very officials who are currently determining how many seats AMLO’s coalition has in Congress.

“This is very serious,” said Judge Juana Fuentes Velazquez, the head of JUFED, one of Mexico’s main judicial associations. “It’s an award for the justices to rule in their favor just when they are about to decide.”

Ricardo Monreal, Morena’s Senate leader, dismissed such claims this week, saying that the change was meant to allow the electoral judges to oversee the first round of judicial votes, which will include elections for the Supreme Court. 

It is “a strictly obligatory matter to provide certainty and legal security to the election,” he said in a written response to questions from Bloomberg News.

‘Major Risk’

Efforts to thwart the reform push have ramped up as an initial vote in the lower house’s constitutional affairs committee nears.

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Judges and judicial workers launched strikes against the proposal across the nation this week. US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar criticized the reforms in a Thursday statement, warning they would pose “major risk” to democracy while also making it easier for drug cartels and organized crime to infiltrate the judiciary. Canada’s ambassador joined in, saying that investors had raised deep concerns about the plan. 

The Mexican peso has fallen 11% since the country’s June election amid AMLO’s pledges to use Morena’s gains to approve the reforms. The political noise, along with the continued unwinding of so-called carry trades, pushed the peso near its lowest levels since 2022 this week. It is the only major currency down in August, and by far the worst performer among the 16 majors tracked by Bloomberg.

But AMLO and his allies appear undeterred by those developments: The president blasted Salazar as “disrespectful” on Friday, while President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum — a Morena member — called the strikes illegal and waved away investor concerns about the reforms in public comments this week. 

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That has intensified the focus on the electoral court, which is due to rule on pending election challenges by Wednesday.

Morena and its coalition easily cleared the supermajority threshold necessary to pass constitutional reforms in the lower house in the June elections, and finished just two seats shy of two-thirds control of the Mexican Senate, according to results confirmed Friday by the National Electoral Institute. 

The opposition, however, has alleged in complaints that Morena ran some of its own candidates as members of other allied parties, an effort to skirt constitutional provisions that limit individual parties to a maximum of 300 lawmakers in the lower house.

Morena and its coalition, which won 364 seats in June, have denied the claims, saying that the lawmakers are from different parties and that if anything the opposition has benefited from that “overrepresentation” in the past.

The opposition sees the challenges as a way to reduce the size of Morena’s majorities and complicate the reform process. A victory for Morena’s coalition, by contrast, would smooth the legislative path in front of the proposed overhaul.

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Monreal said the constitutional committee will make the final decision on when the judges face election, and cast doubt on the idea that a pressure campaign against the electoral court would work anyway.

“I know the justices personally; they don’t allow themselves to be blackmailed by anyone,” he told reporters Tuesday. “They don’t allow themselves to be pressured by anything, I know their moral authority.”

But to reform opponents, it is AMLO’s latest attempt to undermine Mexican democracy.

Senator Kenia Lopez called on the National Electoral Institute and the electoral court “not to bow down” to the government, saying in a Wednesday speech to the chamber that doing so would give AMLO and Morena the votes to “destroy” the country’s institutions.

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