Breathe
By Lourdes Molina
In Mexico it is not the first time that judges are elected by popular vote, the question is: are we facing the destruction of democracy by eliminating counterweights and thus minorities will be silenced? Well, remembering the first part of the question contextualized to the last election and if there was an even floor in it, it is enough to remember the morning news to notice that the Executive intervened in the past electoral process, affecting the impartiality and neutrality, the electoral resolutions confirmed that the President failed to comply with the rules of neutrality in the electoral process, which leads us to the answer that in the election of judges by popular vote there will not be an even floor.
Given such a scenario, the next question is: what would be the risks, the logical answer: that independence and autonomy will be affected; however, not necessarily.
Therefore, it is appropriate to briefly review the judicial history of Mexico since the Constitution of 1824, when the Ministers of the Court were elected as the President of the Republic, governors and attorney general, elected by indirect vote, through electoral colleges -as in the United States today-, one per district or constituency and voted for the candidates for president, governor, mayors and ministers of the Court.
That was the dominant method in the 19th century, in the Constitution of 1957 there was some kind of less popular nuance than in the centralist constitutions, in the 7 constitutional laws of 1836 and in the organic bases since 1843 where the president and congress were basically responsible for the election of ministers.
Except for this centralist period in the federal constitutions of the 19th century, of the 24th and 57th, the election of ministers was indirect; the same as the rest of the elected authorities of the country; in the reform act of 1847 drafted by Don Mariano Otero established direct election of ministers, it was a reform to the Constitution of the 24th did not enter into force and that is why the ministers could not be directly elected after 1847.
From the Constitution of 1917 to the present day there have been three methods of appointing ministers, from 17 to 28 it was the local legislatures that proposed the candidates, giving a federalist component to the appointment of ministers and the Congress of the Union appointed them from the proposals of the local legislatures, which implied that the ministers were lawyers from the states of the Republic.
At present, the centralist method that generally privileges the appointment of lawyers residing in Mexico City is governed by the model that relies on the President and the qualified majority of the Senate, in this way from the year 28 to 94 the method was proposed by the President of the Republic and the Senate, there was no shortlist, it was the President who proposed and the Senate ratified.
Those were the years of PRI hegemony, the president's candidate was almost automatically a minister, because the president's party had a qualified majority in the Senate for most of the 20th century.
In 1988 -the time of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, without a qualified majority-, comes the constitutional reform of 1994, in effect with Ernesto Zedillo, the President proposed a shortlist, which the Senate by qualified majority appoints, without agreement on two occasions, as happened recently with Minister Lenia Batres, the President chooses from the second slate, the method in force obeys the political composition of 2018, the positions and reforms were agreed between PRI, PAN and PRD in Peña Nieto's time, it was the governance of the country, agreements of parties that added together formed a qualified majority, that is how it worked until 2018.
The political change in which the PRI and PAN are in the minority is causing the new method, because the agreement between the two majority political forces in the Senate to elect ministers or to carry out constitutional reforms no longer operates.
The question is: what is the best method to strengthen the Judiciary? Undoubtedly, it is statistically proven that Mexico has the lowest levels of rule of law and security, and justice is one of the least trusted aspects. If we add to this the fact that Morena, as the majority force in Congress, has the possibility of approving reforms and appointments that constitutionally correspond to it and has modified the political system from 1994 to 2018, the least pertinent method to strengthen the judiciary is that of resistance against the overwhelming majority that has taken as a banner the unflattering results of justice in Mexico.
Then let us deal with the correct definition of the profile of the judge, of the human being who is at the head of the institution, of the accountability of the judges and of a true reengineering of the institutional structure, which has stopped in time, having become the main tool to promote inefficiency, ineffectiveness, corruption, in a word, institutionalized injustice; because history reminds you that the most worrying thing is not whether the minister is elected by vote or appointed by an empowered official, but that the candidates from which the voted or appointed one is selected, those candidates are the holders of the best profiles.
We look forward to seeing you in the next edition with the profile of the judge according to the 19th century.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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