Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
There is democratic decay when the justice system is used for political domination. It is a resource employed from political strategies emanating from the political polarization that extends to literally worldwide levels. The significant difference from country to country refers to the degree of independence and absolute autonomy of judges in each nation. There is a difference between a country with a judicial system where judges do not consider the opinion of the political authorities when making decisions and those where judges are totally subordinated to the interests and projects of the political power.
For example, Donald Trump is a “serial plaintiff” who, in the opinion of Judge John Middlebrooks of Florida, had “shown a pattern of misusing the courts to further his political agenda.” In this case, he had sued Hillary Clinton over allegations of fraud in the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won and which Clinton acknowledged. As punishment for Trump and his lawyer, Alina Habba, Judge Middleton fined them $1 million. Said Middleton: “This case should never have been filed. Its inadequacy as a legal remedy was apparent from the beginning. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it for a political purpose; none of the counts in the mandated complaint indicated a cognizable legal claim.” He further noted that the lawsuit was “a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those who have opposed him.”
In the opposite case, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, by a simple majority, to nullify the vested rights of American women to decide about their bodies and the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy or for medical reasons. What is relevant in this case is that the central motivation of the Justices, in this case, in annulling a right acquired by women more than fifty years ago was due to the religious and ideological prejudices of the most conservative sectors of U.S. society. In other words, subjective elements still motivate judges’ decisions even in an independent judicial system.
There are countries where the justice systems move almost solely influenced by the political and economic interests of their powerful centers of political power. Our country is one of those cases.
The face of this relationship is defined by the President of the Republic himself through his own words when, in the heat of the selection process for the Presidency of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), he referred that “the Justices must choose those who guarantee the transformation of the country, not those who represent the interests of the old regime”. In other words, he was pressuring the plenary to choose the person he had indicated. The only thing missing was for him to say, “Justice Jazmín Esquivel”. In a surprising show of independence of the Plenary, Justice Norma Lucía Piña Hernández was elected as its President, and she is the one who possibly enjoys the highest level of autonomous criteria concerning the President of the Republic among the Justices of the Court.
Her election reflects that not all is lost in the Mexican judicial system, despite the many pressure factors from the Executive Branch. It confirms that the struggle between autonomy or subordination is stronger than ever in this instance of power within the Mexican State.
Along with this notoriously positive note, the bad ones abound and include cynicism from the top of power. The refusal of Justice Jazmín Esquivel to recognize that she lost all her moral authority to maintain her position as Justice after having been found to have plagiarized her undergraduate thesis is an attitude of the upper echelons of power that governs by its economic strength and capacity to impose, not by its legitimacy. And losing their legitimacy publicly neither embarrasses nor grieves them since they know that legitimacy was never part of why they came to power.
The Justice and her husband, the Contractor loved by the President, are a power couple that harasses all and sundry, legally, politically, and economically. They are the clear expression of the new political and economic class that the President of the Republic is building in his shadow. In a few years, this new bourgeoisie will be identified and known when it begins to build hotels, convention centers, and shopping malls along the route of the Mayan Train. The roulette of the distribution and sale of real estate along this railroad is taking place at this moment, directed by the Presidential Palace, with cost overruns of 10% to 15% for the author of the bourgeois dreams of the buyers. The Justice Minister and the Contractor-Builder are in the select group of the new grateful ones.
The Attorney General of the Republic litigates his hatred of the sister-in-law and uses the power of the State to crush her. The President of the Republic uses the power of the State to try to legally prosecute the author of the book El Rey del Cash (The King of Cash), mainly for the genius of having found the nickname that defines him as the title of her book. For the rest of his days, he will be known as the King of Cash. For that, he wants to imprison the author.
The Builder wants to destroy his former daughter-in-law and uses the judicial system and his wife, the Justice Minister, to achieve his goals. They are protected in their misdeeds by the blind eye of the friendly President.
The President’s relatives will be, among others, beneficiaries of the real estate speculation unleashed by the Mayan Train route. This business will remain the great booty of this six-year term. It is, without a doubt, an example of the use of the public budget and the Mexican Army at the service of real estate speculation to enrich private individuals, all friends of the President. That is why a sector of the Judiciary has been placed at the service of the interests of that emerging bourgeoisie that does not want to allow the alternation of power in 2024.
Politicized justice is nourished by social polarization. While the oppositions are organizing themselves to compete in the elections of 2023 and 2024, the President is silently advancing in consolidating his pact Morena-new and old bourgeoisie-Army-narco-trafficking. That is what he understands as “the transformation” of the regime. It is a new system of domination that will subject society to new dictates of economic plunder, suppression of democracy with the control of elections, and oppression of the poor eternalized in their condition of submission.
This new system needs to prevent the alternation of power. This need is the origin of the President’s Plan B to render the INE useless before the 2024 elections. Even if Plan B is approved in the Senate, the challenges to this perverse model destructive of democracy will have to be subjected to the scrutiny and evaluation of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. Hence lies the importance of selecting a President of the SCJN with her own criteria for the final resolution on the unconstitutionality, or not, of Plan B. If it is largely rejected, the strategic project of the President and his allies to avoid the alternation in 2024 will fall.
Therein lies the historical importance of having an independent Court with criteria based on the Constitution and the rule of law and not on the interests of the political power of the moment. It will define whether Mexico moves towards autocracy or democracy.
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