https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/05/23/opinion/mexico-judges-elections-claudia-sheinbaum/
Mexico’s dangerous constitutional ‘reform’
Cartels and other powerful interests will now find it easier to influence judges.
By Stephen Kinzer – Boston Globe - May 23, 2025
Mexico is about to become the only country in the world where voters elect all judges. This “constitutional reform” was promoted as an anticorruption measure. It may have the opposite effect. Powerful economic interests and violent criminals, including drug lords, will now have easier access to the judiciary.
The mass judicial election, scheduled for June 1, may be a turning point for Mexico. Rule of law has been weakening there for years. Electing judges threatens to weaken it further.
This radical political change sets an example for authoritarian leaders everywhere. Independent judges often block their plans. Mexico’s regime has found a way to undermine their independence. It has designed an ingenious new system that seems democratic because it is based on elections but in fact may allow corrupt elites to dictate who wears judicial robes.
Electing judges is a bad idea because it places popularity ahead of competence, experience, temperament, and other prized judicial qualities. Several countries, including the United States, allow election of some judges, but none has ever gone as far as Mexico.
Mexican voters who go to the polls on June 1 will face a baffling array of ballots — more than half a dozen in some places. Five thousand candidates are running for 840 federal judgeships; 1,700 are seeking local posts; and more than 80 are running for the nine Supreme Court seats. The Mexican monitoring group Defensorxs has listed several dozen candidates it says have ties to organized crime. Even conscientious voters, however, have almost no way to learn who the candidates are or what they represent. That allows malevolent interests to amass pools of votes for their favored candidates.
The roots of this “reform” go back to the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, who was in office from 2018 to 2024. He was a populist who championed the poor, pilloried the rich, and relentlessly attacked judges who blocked his projects. Sometimes he denounced them by name at press conferences.
In Mexico’s highly stressed criminal justice system, judges have often been stubborn holdouts in defending principles of legality and due process. They have been chosen through a rigorous process that requires written and oral examinations. As a result, many of the country’s most respected legal scholars have risen to the Supreme Court and other important judicial posts.
The Supreme Court sparked AMLO’s anger in 2023 when it ruled that a security force he created could not be transferred from civilian to military control. Later that year it blocked his effort to use national security as a basis for avoiding legal reviews of the Maya Train, his pet infrastructure project. Then it overruled his proposal to give the government-owned oil company advantages over private companies.
AMLO’s denunciation of the judges who made those decisions, according to Margaret Satterthwaite, the United Nations rapporteur for judicial independence, “was not a method for addressing real issues of corruption or ineptitude — it was a way to turn judges into the perceived enemy.”
This conflict led AMLO to propose the new system that is now going into effect under his successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum.
From now on, candidates for judicial posts will all be nominated by representatives of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. There is no provision for candidates to run independently, without a nomination. All sitting judges are to be removed once the new judges are installed this summer.
Most sobering is the new “disciplinary committee” that will review judicial decisions. It will be made up of judges who are themselves elected and will have the power to discipline any judge for “acts or omissions contrary to the public interest, or to the proper administration of justice.” The committee’s decisions may not be appealed.
Debate over this far-reaching reform was stormy. When the Senate convened to vote last year, protesters crashed into the chamber, forcing senators to flee to another building. An opposition senator changed his vote at the last moment to give the reform a one-vote victory. Thousands of judges and magistrates staged a protest strike. They and their supporters poured onto the streets. It was to no avail, largely because AMLO remained highly popular.
His popularity allowed him to usher Sheinbaum into the presidency last October. She has shown her loyalty by embracing his judicial reform and even mimicking his attacks on judges. When one sought to slow the judicial reform, she threatened to seek disciplinary punishment and warned: “A judge is not above the people.”
One of the most distressing features of Mexico’s fragile democracy is the systematic murder of candidates who are seen as opposing drug cartels or other criminal enterprises. By one count, 37 were killed last year. Anyone who campaigns for a judgeship in Mexico on a platform of fighting gangs and public corruption is in mortal danger. Fear and bribery are features of Mexican politics. There is no reason to believe that next month’s judicial elections will unfold differently.
“This June 1,” President Sheinbaum proclaimed in a recent speech, “we are going to demonstrate that Mexico is the most democratic country in the world, because we elect not only a president, governors, deputies, and senators but also the entire judicial branch.”
In fact, judicial reform like the one now being imposed in Mexico may prove anti-democratic. It removes an essential barrier to autocracy.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.