Mexico's first judicial elections fuel confusion and disillusionment among voters

Boston Globe

2 days ago

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'I'm not interested (in voting). Parties and their messages – they come and they go. It's all the same,' said Raul Bernal, a 50-year-old factory worker in downtown Mexico City.
Yet the vote is set to transform Mexico's judiciary. Mexico's ruling party, Morena, overhauled the court system late last year, fueling protests and criticism that the reform is an attempt by those in power to seize on their political popularity to gain control of the branch of government until now out of their reach.
'It's an effort to control the court system, which has been a sort of thorn in the side' of those in power, said Laurence Patin, director of the legal organization Juicio Justo in Mexico. 'But it's a counter-balance, which exists in every healthy democracy.'
Now, instead of judges being appointed on a system of merit and experience, Mexican voters will choose between some 7,700 candidates vying for more than 2,600 judicial positions.
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Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, of Morena, rejected criticisms after voting on Sunday in a press conference, insisting that the election would only make Mexico more democratic and root out corruption in a system that most Mexicans believe is broken.
'Whoever says that there is authoritarianism in Mexico is lying,' she said. 'Mexico is a country that is only becoming more free, just and democratic because that is the will of the people.'
Those who did turn out to cast their ballot – both critics and supporters of the overhaul – emphasized the importance of the election.
In a middle-class Mexico City neighborhood, poll workers organized the color-coded ballots by federal and local contests. Four people were waiting to vote when the location opened. Esteban Hernández, a 31-year-old veterinary student, said he didn't agree with electing judges and doesn't support Morena, but came to vote because 'since there isn't much participation, my vote will count more.'
He had studied the candidates on a website listing their qualifications and decided to pick those who had doctorates. Other critics said they only voted for the Supreme Court and other top courts.
At a polling place in a park in Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala, Francisco Torres de León, a 62-year-old retired teacher, came prepared, having studied the ballots and his selections. He marked all the ballots in about five minutes, but even so, said, 'the process is painstaking because there are too many candidates and positions that they're going to fill.'
Sheinbaum's predecessor and political mentor, former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had pushed through the judicial reform, but remained out of the public eye since leaving office last year, also voted in Chiapas Sunday near his ranch.
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'I wanted to participate in this historic election,' he said. 'Never in the history of our country … have the people decided and had the right to elect judges.'
The process however had raised concerns.
Civil society organizations have raised red flags about a range of candidates running for election, including lawyers who represented some of Mexico's most feared cartel leaders and local officials who were forced to resign from their positions due to corruption scandals.
Also among those putting themselves forward are ex-convicts imprisoned for years for drug trafficking to the United States and a slate of candidates with ties to a religious group whose spiritual leader is behind bars in California after pleading guilty to sexually abusing minors.
Though others like Martha Tamayo, a lawyer and former congresswoman from conflict-ravaged Sinaloa, cast doubt on projections that the election could hand even more power over to criminals and criminal groups, simply because they already have strong control over courts.
'The influence of criminal groups already exists,' she said while waiting to vote. 'The cartels go with the judges (bribe them) whether they are elected or not.'
At the same time, voters have been plagued by confusion over a voting process that Patin warned has been hastily thrown together. Voters often have to choose from sometimes more than a hundred candidates who are not permitted to clearly voice their party affiliation or carry out widespread campaigning.
As a result, many Mexicans say they're going into the vote blind, though others voting on Sunday noted they supported the process despite the confusion. Mexico's electoral authority has investigated voter guides being handed out across the country, in what critics say is a blatant move by political parties to stack the vote in their favor.
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'Political parties weren't just going to sit with their arms crossed,' Patin said.
Miguel Garcia, a 78-year-old former construction worker, stood in front of the country's Supreme Court on Friday peering at a set of posters, voter guides with the faces and numbers of candidates.
He was fiercely scribbling down their names on a small scrap of paper and said that he had traveled across Mexico City to try to inform himself ahead of the vote, but he couldn't find any information other than outside the courthouse. But Garcia, a supporter of the reform and the president, said doing so was crucial because he wanted to cast out members of courts that had long been at odds with Morena, the ruling party.
'In the neighborhood where I live, there's no information for us,' he said, adding that he had to vote because 'the bad guys, they continue to be free, and the people are the ones that pay.'