The presidential subversion of the Mexican judiciary

RevDem Podcast

Oliver Garner: You have recently published a working paper for the CEU Democracy Institute on the subversion of judicial legitimacy in Mexico by presidential rhetoric. Could you summarize this phenomenon for our listeners who may not be familiar with the political context in Mexico?

Azul Aguilar: I wanted to explore how the dynamics of attacks from the President on the judiciary are evolving and what are the causes, conditions, and the timing of these rhetorical attacks. I wanted to explore this because the judiciary is an important institution in presidential and constitutional democracies as it guarantees the separation of powers and checks and balances. I wanted to study this and put it into a research program because, since the arrival of our current President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador in 2018, we have seen variations in how the president refers to the judges and constitutional judges in the judiciary. I started my discussion in the working paper from the 1994 judicial reform. This reform is very important for us because it radically transformed the performance of the judiciary. The 1994 reform introduced judicial independence for the courts and a professional system of judges. But the most important change in this reform was that it empowered the courts through a mechanism called constitutional actions. This mechanism of judicial review allowed the courts to review the legislation of both the executive and the legislative branch in Mexico. It also allowed another mechanism, called amparo, meaning the real rights that can be contested by society because they think some institutional acts violate or breach their rights.