Mexico’s controversial judicial reform measure officially took effect on Sunday following the publication of the text of the constitutional amendment in Mexico’s government gazette.
The majority of Mexican state legislatures had approved the constitutional amendment described as “the most far-reaching” judicial overhaul ever attempted by a major democracy on September 12th marking the final legislative step in the amendment’s ratification process.
Just a day earlier, amidst protests that temporarily brought the legislative session to a halt, Mexico’s Senate narrowly managed the two-thirds vote required to approve the judicial reform following its initial passage by Mexico’s lower house of Congress on September 4th.
Supreme Court Justices had previously been appointed by the Senate after being recommended by Mexico’s president.
The reform measure, however, will effectively end judicial tenure by mandating the popular election of more than 6,500 judges, magistrates, and ministers including members of Mexico’s Supreme Court. The first wave of judicial elections will occur in 2025 with a subsequent round of elections occurring in 2027.
Among a range of other changes, the reform also reduces the number of justices on the Supreme Court from eleven to nine and limits the length of their terms to 12 years.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known by his initials AMLO, now in his final weeks in office, had defended the reform package as necessary to combat corruption in Mexico’s judiciary.
Critics have argued, however, that the reforms pose a serious threat to Mexican democracy and, ultimately, to Mexico’s economic development as well.
In a recent editorial, for example, the Editorial Board of the Washington Post, characterized the reform measure as a threat to “judicial independence and the rule of law in a country that has known too little of either during its long history.”
The piece prompted a direct response in the form of a letter to the editor from Marcelo Ebrard and Juan Ramón de la Fuente calling the Post’s position both “worrisome and puzzling” and a contravention of the “U.N.-recognized principle that nations have a duty not to intervene in matters within the internal jurisdiction of any state.” Ebrard and De la Fuente will serve as secretary of the economy and secretary of foreign affairs, respectively, in the cabinet of Claudia Sheinbaum, the president-elect of Mexico. Criticism of the measure has not been confined to editorials, however.
In late August, members of the bipartisan Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, issued a joint statement expressing the committee’s “deep concern” with the judicial reform to the constitution, which the committee members believe could potentially “contradict commitments” made in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement.
In a similar vein, on September 10th, Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) and Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) introduced a bi-partisan resolution in the House warning of the “long-term negative impact on Mexico’s democratic institutions, separation of powers, judicial independence and transparency, and security, while undermining its electoral system, National Guard, and oversight agencies.”
U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar had previously warned in August that the reform measure posed “a major risk to the functioning of Mexico’s democracy” and cautioned that passage of the reform could damage the U.S.-Mexico trade relationship.
At about the same time, Canada’s ambassador to Mexico, Graeme Clark, expressed his concerns regarding the reform package noting that Canadian investors wanted “stability” and recourse to “a judicial system that works if there are problems.”
López Obrador responded to these comments by denouncing them as disrespectful of Mexican “sovereignty” and also by imposing what he describes as a “pause” on diplomatic relations with the both the U.S. and Canadian embassies specifying that the pause related specifically to the embassies and not to the countries as a whole.
Although Lopez Obrador has employed the term before when he “paused” diplomatic relations with Spain in 2022 over concerns relating to Spain’s position in Mexico’s energy sector, it’s not exactly clear what this pause means in this particular context since the term does not exist in formal diplomatic codes.
What is clear, however, is how the Mexican peso has responded, at least initially, to the looming passage of judicial reform in Mexico. Until just a few months ago, the Mexican peso was by far the strongest performing major currency in the world according to a list of real effective exchange rates compiled by Bloomberg. This past week, however, the peso plunged to its lowest rate against the U.S. dollar in nearly two years. Despite nascent signs that investors may have started looking past the controversial judicial reform measure, the peso’s recent slide constitutes what one analyst described as “a stark reversal” for the currency which, until just a few months ago, was so strong investors “feared betting against” it.
