Mexico’s Judicial Overhaul Overcomes Its Biggest Obstacle: The Senate

The chamber’s approval clears away the last major hindrance to the sweeping proposals championed by the president, which have prompted nationwide strikes.

Mexico’s Senate on Wednesday narrowly passed a sweeping proposal to revamp the judiciary system, effectively clearing the last major obstacle to a measure that the country’s president had vowed to push through before stepping down at the end of this month.

The result reflects the exceptional sway of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and his party after his allies won large legislative majorities in June, enabling them to pass some of the Mexican leader’s most contentious and far-reaching proposals in his final weeks in office.

The measure would shift the judiciary from an appointment-based system largely grounded in training and qualifications to one where voters elect judges and there are few requirements to run — and it would remove 7,000 judges from their jobs, from the chief justice of the Supreme Court down to those at local courts.

The bill already passed in the lower house of Congress last week, during a marathon session. It will now go to the state legislatures, where it will need a majority to be enacted into law. Mr. López Obrador’s governing Morena party and its allies control 25 of 32 state legislatures, so it is expected to be approved with ease.

When that happens, voters could start electing thousands of federal, state and local judges as soon as next year.

The debate, which started on Tuesday, was temporarily suspended after a group of protesters, megaphones and Mexican flags in hand, barged into the Senate building calling on senators to block the overhaul. Protesters followed the lawmakers to another venue, where an opposition senator was assaulted when someone threw gasoline on his face. Police officers later dispersed demonstrations using fire extinguishers.

After a heated session in which legislators accused each other of being “traitors” and “liars,” 86 senators approved the bill and 41 voted against it.

The government says the overhaul is needed to modernize the judiciary and to instill trust in a system plagued by graft, influence-peddling and nepotism. Mr. López Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, takes office on Oct. 1 and has fully backed the plan.

However, the proposal has met fierce resistance from judicial workers, law experts, investors, judges, students, opposition legislators and other critics. Mr. López Obrador’s determination to push it through has kept financial markets on edge and caused a diplomatic spat with the U.S. and Canada’s ambassadors. Even leaders in the Catholic church have said the election of judges would not guarantee a better delivery of justice for Mexico’s victims of criminal violence.

“Where does that leave my 27 years of service? I started from the bottom,” said Sandra Herrera Benítez, a court clerk and spokeswoman for judicial workers in the northern city of Monterrey, who went on strike last month with thousands of other federal court workers across Mexico. “Now, to be a judge or magistrate you have to be friends with the president or some politician.”

Experiences in countries such as the United States or Bolivia, where voters can elect some judges, have shown that doing so carries the risk of making judicial seats more politicized.

“Judges respond to the incentives that elections create,” said Amrit Singh, a law professor at Stanford University and an expert on rule of law. “The judiciary will be politicized beyond recognition.”

Mr. López Obrador first presented his idea of overhauling the judiciary last year. Angered at the Supreme Court for blocking some of his administration’s plans, such as weakening Mexico’s electoral watchdog agency or putting the National Guard under the military’s control, he vowed to have judges and justices elected by popular vote — a move seen as retaliation by some analysts.

“The judiciary is hopeless, it is rotten,” he told reporters back then, calling on his supporters to give his political movement large majorities in Congress at the polls in order to pass the overhaul and change the constitution.

On Election Day, voters cemented Morena’s dominance in the lower house but left the Senate a few seats short of a supermajority. On Wednesday, however, Morena and its allies secured the two-thirds majority required for passage when three opposition senators voted in favor of the overhaul. Another opposition senator, Daniel Barreda, was absent from the vote because his father had been detained by the authorities in southern Mexico, he told reporters.

Days before the vote, opposition legislators said they had been threatened, blackmailed and offered bribes to get them to approve the overhaul.

In recent weeks, protests and strikes erupted across the country over the proposed changes. Judicial workers and their supporters have organized sit-ins to block access to the lower house of Congress and the Senate.

Still, people have also taken to the streets to defend the overhaul. More than half of the country’s business leaders support the proposal, according to Mexico’s association of chambers of commerce. Polls commissioned by Morena indicate around 80 percent of the participants think revamping the judicial system is necessary — though other polls find that more than 50 percent of those surveyed don’t know what the overhaul entails.

The tension has even divided the Supreme Court. Justice Loretta Ortiz, who was appointed by Mr. López Obrador and has called herself a “founder of Morena,” said on social media that the overhaul “will decisively contribute to guaranteeing the access to justice that Mexicans deserve.”

Some experts say it will take years for the impact of the legislation to be fully understood.

“The president’s proposal is an experiment,” said Vanessa Romero Rocha, a lawyer and political analyst, adding that the overhaul’s effect will need to be evaluated in a few years time as there is no precedent for it. “The president’s main objective, so I see it, is to remove all the judges who have been around for a long time and who are deeply corrupt.”

Yet others say that the current plan would exacerbate the problems of corruption that the government is trying to eliminate.

“The dismantling of the judiciary is not the way forward,” Norma Piña, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who opposes the measures, said in a televised message on Sunday. She also presented a counterproposal to redesign the system.

That plan includes steps such as making the selection of judges more transparent so as to prevent nepotism and privilege merit, creating independent disciplinary mechanisms, strengthening local judiciaries — where corruption is more prevalent — and improving state prosecutors’ offices.

But the judiciary’s counterproposal, analysts say, came a little too late.

“This reform is and will be historic. It will change the way the judiciary is seen and conceived,” said Morena senator Ernestina Godoy Ramos during Tuesday’s debate. “Justice is everyone’s business.”

Miriam Castillo contributed research from Mexico City.