Politics: Corruption and rule of law in the 4T sphere
Last week’s shocking Supreme Court ruling authorizing President López Obrador to hold a popular consultation in which voters were to decide whether to put on trial all five previous presidents for any supposed misdeeds tells a very damning story about the state of democracy and the rule of law in Mexico. The decision was all the more unexpected because of the clear consensus among all serious lawyers and jurists was that such a plebiscite was patently unconstitutional. Or in the words of the justice in charge of drafting the proposed ruling as the basis of the justices’ deliberations, the very idea of making cases of criminal justice the subject of a popular consultation and its proponents' arguments constituted “a concert of unconstitutionalities".
A bare majority of justices validated the ballot initiative, albeit while reformulating the way the question would be posed to voters so as to sidestep its most egregious aspects. The two justices that joined the four presumed AMLO loyalists on the high court were probably looking to avoid a direct confrontation with the president and eventual reprisals on his part. Nevertheless, after building on his control over Congress, autonomous bodies, and putting state governments on a tighter leash, the idea that he had bent the nation’s highest court to his will seemed a fundamental step toward consolidating López Obrador’s autocratic designs.
But it is unlikely to be all smooth sailing ahead for the administration. AMLO’s constant use of corruption allegations against officials and all adversaries, real or imagined, is starting to wear thin, especially as the list of corruption scandals even at the highest levels of his own administration and inner circle continues to grow. And in case that fact had begun to fade in the public eye, we recently got a reminder when a long-time López Obrador loyalist ended a brief stint as director of, irony of ironies, the Institute for Returning Stolen Goods to the People because of pressure from the president’s own personal secretary to ignore legal requirements while managing an institute handling many millions of dollars in confiscated assets.
If the issue of dealing with corruption – which necessarily entails the proper application of rule of law – ceases to work in favor of the president’s approval ratings and voter preferences for the political parties supporting his administration, López Obrador could face serious problems next year.
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