Opinion Can Mexico’s democracy survive López Obrador’s judicial reforms?
Mexico is not alone in hemming in its judiciary. Such experiments always end the same way: badly.
Economic prospects looked stable. Mexico’s poverty rate continued its long decline. Though the economy was weakening, the peso remained remarkably strong. And the business class remained convinced that “nearshoring,” while not quite evident in investment numbers, would underpin Mexico’s economic future.
Then López Obrador threw a spanner in the works. With a near lock on a constitution-busting majority in the new Congress, his party, Morena, last week set in motion his “Plan C” to assert control over the country’s judiciary — pretty much the only check left on presidential power — sending the smooth transition into disarray.
Why? It was partly about payback. AMLO, as the president is known, tussled with the judiciary even before he became president. While in office, he has engaged in messy brawls with a Supreme Court not shy about shooting down presidential initiatives it deems unconstitutional.
But Mexico’s predicament is not unique. It sits on a curve with a growing set of countries — from Poland and Hungary to El Salvador and Bolivia — where political leaders, whether from the right or left, have leveraged electoral popularity to hobble the one branch of government that can still stand in the way of their dreams.
These leaders invariably brand the power grab as “democracy.” The process, in fact, is causing liberal democracy to buckle around the world.
Attacks on the judiciary can be sold (sometimes accurately) as fighting against corruption, or in the service of an indispensable national project. But there are often darker objectives: Courts are effective tools for carrying out political vendettas, staying in power or protecting leaders soon to be out of power who might find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
At a conference about judicial independence organized by Mexico’s threatened Supreme Court, Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, the former president of Bolivia and, before that, of Bolivia’s Supreme Court, noted that governments like politically aligned courts “for purposes they cannot confess.”
He would know. Rodríguez witnessed how Bolivia in 2011 became the only country in the world to elect judges to its highest courts, a reform pushed through by charismatic president Evo Morales. As it happened, two-thirds of voters cast a null or blank vote in the two judicial elections thus far. Judges were elected by partisans of the ruling party, committed to serving its interests, including allowing Morales to run for a third and fourth term — despite a constitutional limit of two.
Plan C’s ultimate cost to Mexico is hard to ascertain. But things are getting messy. Domestic and foreign investors are freaking out, worried about how it will affect the security of their investments. The United States has warned that AMLO’s judicial changes will threaten North American integration under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which comes up for review in 2026. And the formerly superstrong peso has lost nearly 15 percent against the dollar since the end of May.
Nongovernmental organizations are alarmed at what they see as threats to human rights embedded in the plan, which includes handing over control of the civilian national guard to the military, abolishing autonomous bodies such as the freedom of information agency (which is empowered to demand information from the government) and expanding mandatory pretrial detention (which would give prosecutors the power to imprison people accused of many crimes at will).
Then there’s Plan C’s main course: to remove the entire federal bench, up to the Supreme Court itself, as well as judges in all state courts — thousands of judges altogether — and have them all subject to replacement by 2027 via elections that will all but inevitably be swept by candidates endorsed by Morena, the political juggernaut of the moment.
López Obrador calls this democracy. But as Carlos Ayala Corao, the former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights argued, “even majorities have limits” in a constitutional democracy, and “the job of the judge is not to please majorities.”
It is the job of an independent judiciary, Margaret Satterthwaite, the U.N. special rapporteur for the independence of judges and lawyers, noted in a letter to the Mexican president, to “protect human rights and act as a counterweight to the powers that might threaten such rights.” A judiciary that is politically aligned with the executive cannot do this job. Minorities — really, anybody on the wrong side of the president’s whims — beware!
Mexican government officials have tried to deflect criticism by arguing that judges are also elected in several U.S. states. This is a red herring. They forget to note that pretty much everybody — academics, NGOs, the American Bar Association — considers this a flawed mechanism prone to manipulation by moneyed interests and vulnerable to political pressures that distort judicial decisions.
A loyal judiciary can accomplish much for the president. It can rubber-stamp whatever the leader wants, from expanding military control over civilian functions to claiming reasons of “national security” to green-lighting pet government projects. It can also keep government information from the public on all sorts of things, from corruption scandals to how much it spent on vaccines during the mismanaged covid-19 pandemic to megaprojects like the Maya Train.
But like the dismantling of the judiciary in El Salvador by the right-wing administration of Nayib Bukele in 2021, AMLO’s move from the left of the political spectrum will likely prove devastating for the project to transform Mexico into a liberal democracy.
Despite Bukele’s widespread appeal (he won reelection in a landslide in February), Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, which tracks the evolution of democracy around the world, downgraded El Salvador to the status of “electoral autocracy.” Mexico is not quite there, but it has been downgraded to a gray zone on the verge of that class.
Maybe once Plan C is firmly in place — the legislation passed the lower house of Congress last week and will now be taken up by the Senate — Mexico will complete its transformation.
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