The Mexican state is being destroyed

Last week, the most successful and popular Mexican president in living memory took a major step toward dismantling Mexican democracy. Just three weeks before handing over power to his hand-picked successor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) forced Congress to approve his foolish plan to make most Mexican judicial positions, including the Supreme Court, subject to election rather than appointment.

Judicial election is generally a bad idea for reasons that Jesus put it best in the Gospel of Matthew: “No one can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” Elected judges are expected to serve both the law and the electorate. When those two masters pull in different directions, judges who follow the law lose the electorate… and with it their judgeship.

But if electing judges in general is a bad idea, then electing judges in Mexico is a particularly terrible idea. Because Mexico’s political system is now dominated by a charismatic populist—López Obrador—who has built a personality cult, along with a party—MORENA—that he utterly dominates. Candidates running for judicial office in the next two years will have little chance of success without MORENA’s support, meaning that Mexico will likely be left with a political-legal monoculture—MORENA congressmen making laws for a MORENA president to implement and MORENA judges to arbitrate. Elections, in other words, will be little more than a cover for a power grab to monopolize state power in the hands of López Obrador.

But it’s even worse than that, because the Mexican system badly deformed by its enormously powerful drug cartels. These are not simply sprawling criminal enterprises, but in many cases quasi-governments that monopolize violence and administer a form of justice over large swaths of the country. Mexican elections are increasingly marred by the toxic influence of the cartels: they intimidate votersfinances friendly political bosses And murder difficult candidates as a given. Earlier this year, ProPublica led a consortium that substantiated accusations that cartels financed at least López Obrador’s first presidential campaign.

If we elect judges in this climate, we will be handing over the legal system to the cartels. López Obrador knows this.

In reality, what AMLO is proposing — carefully, using coded language — amounts to a long-term deal between the Mexican state and its criminal syndicates. His soft-pedaling approach to the cartels is increasingly turning Mexico into a mafia state, where the interests of drug lords are prioritized over the civil rights of ordinary citizens.

This is why Mexicans are out protest against this reform of the justice system on the streets. In a parting shot, López Obrador has brought about the end of one of the most important guarantees of constitutional government in Mexico. And his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, elected in June, is cheering him on from the sidelines.

Mexico’s new president is a mystery

López Obrador’s parting shot is not a one-off. He has spent his entire term undermining every check and balance in Mexico’s institutional landscape that allowed the country to transition to democracy in 2000. Last year a drastic reform was carried out that Mexico’s independent electoral administration agency would have been undermined. The Supreme Court overthrown the new law. Now AMLO is going to replace all those judges with elected judges, to ensure that no Supreme Court can overrule a president in the future.

The business community is increasingly concerned about the direction of travel, with the peso’s exchange rate swinging wildly last week amid talk of a deteriorating investment climate. Companies considering investing in Mexico are naturally not encouraged by the prospect of any disputes arising being settled by judges whose robes are the result of a friendly relationship between drug barons and MORENA apparatchiks. The extent to which Mexico’s democratic decline will actually slow or reverse investment flows into the country is currently a matter of heated debate, but no one expects it to help.

What’s the endgame here??

I am far from the first to note that AMLO seems determined to return Mexico to something very similar to the “perfect dictatorship” the country endured for most of the 20th century under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Back then, the party controlled every inch of the state and won every election for more than seven decades. Elections were rigged. Courts ruled almost invariably in favor of the government. The checks and balances enshrined in the constitution were a dead letter.

And yet the PRI, as its name suggests, an institution—the party was bigger than any one man, and had mechanisms in place to ensure that the torch of leadership was passed every six years. López Obrador’s MORENA is a personalist party built entirely around him. Hollow out the state to give MORENA control, and what you’re left with is not the depersonalized bureaucratic authoritarianism of the PRI. What you’re left with could be much closer to the Putin-Medvedev model, with AMLO dominating the political scene regardless of who technically holds the presidency.

Once the institutions that can put a stop to this have been effectively hollowed out, it’s unclear how anyone can slow the process down. Going forward, the worst-case scenario is a self-reinforcing dynamic in which Mexican courts issue nonsensical rulings that favor their political masters and scare away investors, leading to an economic downturn that makes local economies ever more dependent on the drug cartels that helped select the judges in the first place.

Americans should be concerned about this because the United States needs a minimally functioning democracy on its southern border. The institutional degradation that Mexico is experiencing, coupled with the government’s apparent willingness to cede vast swaths of territory to drug cartels, is incompatible with Mexico’s long-term prosperity and stability. And a poor and unstable Mexico is not only an economic burden on the United States, it is also the ultimate push factor for migration. No one wants this. But it is no longer clear that it can be stopped.

Quico Toro is an editor at Persuasion and writes for the Substack One percent brighter.

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