The Mexican State is Being Vandalized
Hollowing out courts while playing footsie with the cartels, Mexico’s President AMLO is leaving office, but not power.
Last week, the most successful and popular Mexican president in living memory took a major step towards dismantling Mexico’s democracy. Just three weeks before handing over power to his hand-picked successor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) hectored congress into approving his harebrained scheme to make most Mexican judgeships—including the Supreme Court—subject to election rather than appointment.
Judicial election in general is a bad idea for reasons Jesus articulated best in the gospel of Matthew: “no man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.” Elected judges are expected to serve both the law and the electorate. When those two masters are pulling in different directions, judges who follow the law lose the electorate… and with it, their judgeships.
But if electing judges is a bad idea in general, electing judges in Mexico is a terrible idea in particular. Because Mexico’s political system is now dominated by a charismatic populist—López Obrador—who has built a cult of personality, along with a party—MORENA—that he fully dominates. Candidates competing in judicial elections over the next two years will have little chance of success without MORENA’s endorsement, which means Mexico will probably be left with a political-judicial monoculture—MORENA congressmen making laws for a MORENA president to execute and MORENA judges to arbitrate. Elections, in other words, will become little more than cover for a power play to monopolize state power in López Obrador’s hands.
But it’s even worse than that, because Mexico’s system is badly distorted by its hugely powerful drug cartels. These aren’t just sprawling criminal enterprises but, in many cases, quasi-governments that monopolize violence and administer some version of justice across wide swathes of territory. Mexican elections are increasingly disfigured by the toxic influence of the cartels: they intimidate voters, finance friendly political bosses and murder troublesome candidates as a matter of course. Earlier this year, ProPublica led a consortium that substantiated charges that cartels financed at least the first of López Obrador’s presidential campaigns.
Making judges subject to election in this climate amounts to handing the judicial system over to the cartels. López Obrador knows this.
In reality, what AMLO is proposing—guardedly, using coded language—amounts to a long-term accommodation between the Mexican state and its criminal syndicates. His softly-softly approach to the cartels is increasingly turning Mexico into a mafia state, where the interests of drug lords take precedence over the civil rights of ordinary citizens.
This is why Mexicans are out protesting this judicial reform on the streets. As a parting shot, López Obrador has engineered the end of one of the most important safeguards to constitutional government in Mexico. And his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum—elected back in June—is cheering him on from the sidelines.
López Obrador’s parting shot is no one-off. He has spent his entire term in office undermining each of the checks and balances in the Mexican institutional landscape that allowed the country to transition to democracy back in 2000. Last year, he railroaded a drastic reform that would have gutted Mexico’s independent electoral administration agency. The Supreme Court overturned the new law. Now AMLO is moving to replace all those judges with elected ones, to ensure no future Supreme Court can overrule a president again.
The business sector is increasingly concerned about the direction of travel, with the peso exchange rate gyrating wildly last week amid chatter about a worsening investment environment. Naturally, businesses considering investing in Mexico aren’t much encouraged by the prospect of having any dispute that arises adjudicated by judges who owe their robes to a friendly understanding between drug barons and MORENA apparatchiks. How much Mexico’s democratic backsliding will actually slow or reverse investment flows into the country is a subject of hot dispute right now—but nobody at all expects it to help.
What is the end-game here?
I’m far from the first to note that AMLO seems determined to take Mexico back to something very much like the “perfect dictatorship” the country endured under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for most of the 20th century. Back then, the party controlled every bit of the state and won every election for more than seven decades. Elections were rigged. Courts virtually always ruled in favor of the government. The checks and balances written into the constitution were a dead letter.
And yet the PRI was, as its name implies, an institution—the party was bigger than any one man, and had mechanisms in place to ensure the leadership torch would be passed on every six years. López Obrador’s MORENA is a personalist party built entirely around him. Hollow out the state to leave MORENA in control, and what you’re left with isn’t the depersonalized bureaucratic authoritarianism of the PRI. What you’re left with could turn out to be much closer to the Putin-Medvedev model, with AMLO dominating the political scene regardless of who technically occupies the presidency.
Once the institutions that might put a stop to this are effectively gutted, it’s unclear how anyone might slow this process down. Going forward, the worst case scenario is a self-reinforcing dynamic where Mexican courts start handing down nonsensical rulings that favor their political masters and scare away investors, leading to an economic downturn that leaves local economies more and more beholden to the drug cartels that helped select the judges in the first place.
Americans should care about this, because the United States needs a minimally functional democracy on its southern border. The institutional degradation Mexico is experiencing, along with its government’s apparent willingness to cede large chunks of territory to drug cartels, is incompatible with Mexico’s long-term prosperity and stability. And a poor and unstable Mexico is not just an economic drag on the United States, it’s also the ultimate push factor for migration. Nobody wants this. But it’s no longer clear that it can still be stopped.
Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack One Percent Brighter.
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Meanwhile, back in the USA, today American liberals would support democratic election of federal judges.
I think that there is really no principled stand here... it is just a calculation of ideological advantage.
All most Americans who get their news about Mexico from the mainstream media know about current events there is that the nation has its first female president. “Yay for Team Woman!” is the conventional wisdom here.