Judicial reform is territory ceded by capitulations. The square of common sense that was conquered in three episodes: from a distracted front, by an abandoned battle and thanks to a serious – and still unpunished – desertion of disloyal people. Three battles lost to blows of naivety. A public asset captured with very few guarding the trench.
The unnoticed front was that crusade declared on February 5, 2024 from Querétaro. Plan C – the presidential macro-initiative to demolish all the spaces of impartiality and technical rigor that the gradualist constitutionalism of the transition designed, from the autonomous bodies to the economic regulators – was a drumbeat that was not wanted to be heard and that was not heard. knew how to resist electorally. That move seemed like an offensive so absurd that it would fall apart due to the imperatives of reality. In the worst scenario, the zeal of the markets, the ‘stability fetish’, the stealth of the North American bureaucracy, the contextual sensitivity of the exchange rate, the election in the United States, the review of the T-MEC, the magical powers of the presidential gang or the influence of empowered moderates, all of this, together or separately, would sooner or later appease the impulses of revenge and judicial populism. It couldn’t be known. In coalitionist mathematics, official qualified majorities were unthinkable. In this sum of our consolations, we did not resort to renewing with arguments and patient civic pedagogy, from the peaceful combat of democratic politics, the consensus on the public reason of the judicial function. The result of the election became a plebiscite, a mandate. Silence or political incapacity yielded the first front.
The abandoned battle was the judicial controversy over legislative overrepresentation. Faced with the obvious fraud against the Constitution, the litigation of testimonial writings without political personality, the insipid allegation, the merely courtly indignation was barely recorded, with honest exceptions that will remain on some lost page of personal congruence. I dare to affirm that with 10 percent of the stamina invested in intra-party affairs, of that ability to find procedural loopholes and judicial alliances for all purposes of the internal life of the parties, a different verdict might have been. And that battle was also lost in the electoral judiciary the day they lost their disgust with the institutionalized Moche: to that veiled extortion of electoral judges with the extension of their mandate without the whim of the raffle and, of course, with the privilege of evading with automatic passing of the ballot boxes.
The citizens did not give the ruling party an arithmetic mandate to change the Constitution. Three turncoats were necessary to complete the quorum qualified as a vote to change the Constitution and to trample on the rights, merit and life expectations of thousands of people and families who serve Mexico from the judiciary. That was the parliamentary disloyalty that explains the other lost fight in the defense of the Republic. And now, with the certainty of the qualified majority that arose from partisan complicity and that arose in an unbreakable pact of impunity, this false majority seeks to isolate us from the civilizational alliance that makes up the hemispheric systems of protection of human rights. So that there are no convictions like the Campo Algodonero case or redeemed victims like Rosendo Cantú, Radilla Pacheco or Gerardo Tzompaxtle, the Constitution be modified to the best of our movement’s knowledge and understanding.
The battle that judges and magistrates fight today would perhaps be less unequal if any of the others had been fought with decision, courage and integrity. I clearly take a position: there are historical, comparative and technical reasons to maintain that the Constitution, its basic structure, the forbidden preserve of fundamental principles, the sphere of the undecidable must prevail over the whim of a majority that is as temporary as it is false. and fraudulent. I firmly believe that a constitutional reform can be unconstitutional and, also, that it can be contrary to conventional human rights that are already part of our internal system.
But it is also true that formal legality can be imposed on us. That all this can end in new rules of the game that will mark entire generations. That we will have to face the dilemma of the democrats of another time between participating and abstaining, between what today may seem like the ‘sterile quixotic adventure’ or the inaction that wants to be a passive condemnation in time, between the risk of legitimation or certainty that all space given up will be co-opted power. Dying for nothing.
I was trained in a political tradition that took the participationist journey with responsibility and conviction, even against the most consolidated and closed of political hegemonies. That tradition that never tired of repeating, from the conscience of duty, that the repeated fight is a guarantee of victory and that the only one truly lost is the abandoned fight. Undermining hegemony in its game, no matter how unfair it may be and no matter how long the road may seem. That is why I want to be a minister of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation by popular vote: to not abandon, to fight each and every one of the battles that remain for freedom and reason.
