Will directly electing judges help Mexico fight corruption in its justice system?

Mexico’s outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has used his party's overwhelming democratic mandate to pass a series of reforms that will make the country the first in the world to elect almost all of its judges by popular vote. It’s a reform that the left-wing leader has championed as a crucial step to curtail the widespread corruption in Mexico’s judiciary – but some are worried it may leave the newly elected judges open to pressure from the country's powerful drug cartels, or even usher in a return to de facto one-party rule.

Mexico is about to become the first country in the world where people will have the power to elect almost every judge in the country, from local magistrates to the justices of the Supreme Court. The sweeping judicial reform narrowly passed through Mexico’s upper house on Wednesday morning after protesters stormed the Senate in a desperate effort to stop lawmakers voting, forcing them to continue the count in a separate building.

The outcome of the vote was not a given. Although the ruling party held the two-thirds supermajority necessary to pass the reform package in the lower-house, they were one vote short in the Senate. A last-minute defection from the conservative opposition finally gave them the numbers they needed – the proposal passed just after midnight.

Outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, widely known by his initials AMLO, hailed the reform’s passage as “an example to the world”.

"It's very important to end corruption and impunity. We will make great progress when it is the people of Mexico who freely elect the judges, the magistrates, the justices," the leftist leader told a press conference the morning after.

"Judges, with honourable exceptions ... are at the service of a predatory minority that has dedicated itself to plundering the country," he said.

The president on Thursday announced that the legislation had been validated by a majority of Mexico’s 32 state congresses – a formality, considering the president’s party has comfortable majorities across much of the country. Once it's published in the government's official gazette, the reform will come into effect and a new justice system will start to take place.

The coming changes

The more than 1,600 federal judges currently serving will resign, with the majority being replaced in elections in June next year. State legislatures will have 180 days to pass similar legislation for their own court systems, putting another 5,000 or so state judges and magistrates up for election alongside the remaining federal positions in 2027.

Candidates will have to have a law degree, a high academic average, a minimum of five years’ professional experience – though not necessarily as judges – and a series of references. These requirements will be vetted by technical committees from both branches of Congress.

The changes don’t stop there. The Supreme Court will be reduced from 11 to nine, and their term limits reduced. A five-person Tribunal for Judicial Discipline will also be elected, with broad powers to investigate and even impeach judges – another means, proponents say, of making the nation’s law courts more responsive to the people’s will rather than private patronage.

Gustavo Flores-Macias, professor of government and public policy at Cornell University, said that AMLO’s criticisms of corruption within the judicial system were well founded.

“The need to tackle corruption in the Mexican judiciary is very real,” he said. “The country's legal system disproportionately favours the affluent and the well connected. It is overburdened and slow. This is true at all levels, which is why impunity is widespread in Mexico.”

AMLO has long characterised Mexico’s rampant corruption as being inextricably linked to the country’s neo-liberal turn in the final years of the 20th century, in which waves of privatisation and outsourcing allowed politically connected private enterprises to siphon off swathes of public money and sharply reduced state capacity to carry out social programmes.

The president has portrayed his six years in office as a bitter struggle to throw off this legacy, and to this end he has sharply raised the minimum wage, strengthened labour unions and overseen vast direct cash transfers to the country’s poor. More controversially, he has imposed a programme of what he calls “republican austerity” to root out rampant cronyism in the state administration and leaned heavily on the nation’s armed forces to oversee state infrastructure projects.

These sweeping measures have led to a significant drop in the number of Mexicans living in poverty– just under nine million people were lifted from poverty between 2020 and 2022, according to the official multidimensional poverty rate.They have also made the outgoing president immensely popular: in the June general elections, his National Regeneration Movement (Morena) won a crushing supermajority in the lower-house Chamber of Deputies and fell one vote short of the same in the Senate. AMLO’s hand-picked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, was elected with just shy of 60 percent of the popular vote.

Now, as his final act before stepping down at the end of the month, AMLO has used this mandate to push through some of the most sweeping judicial reforms yet seen in the 21st century.

'A lot of favours done to business'

William A. Booth, lecturer in Latin American history at University College London, said that painting members of Mexico’s judiciary as aiders and abettors of a rapacious economic elite likely resonated with the ruling party’s supporters.

“One of the reasons this has come about and been possible is there is a very clear overlap between parts of the judiciary and Mexico’s political and economic elite,” he said. “There is a lot of corruption, there are a lot of favours done to business – and I think this does explain why US and Canadian businesses have reacted so strongly to this.”

It must be said that the response from Mexico’s largest trade partners has not been a warm one. In the days leading up to the vote, US ambassador Ken Salazar said the reform was a “major risk” to Mexico’s democracy – and one that could put the two country’s close economic relationship in jeopardy, especially with the USMCA free trade agreement up for review in 2026. Speaking to reporters, the ambassador even raised the prospect that the new system would prove easy pickings for Mexico’s powerful organised crime groups, breaking investor confidence in the country.

"Direct elections would also make it easier for cartels and other bad actors to take advantage of politically motivated and inexperienced judges," he said.

Ramon I. Centeno, lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Public Administration of the University of Sonora, Mexico, said that it was only natural that international investors were worried about their bottom line.

“The main concern for Mexican citizens is not what do American companies think or fear, the main problem here … is that we need more justice,” he said. “We need a better justice system, not because of what foreign investors want, but because here we have a large problem of violence that started in 2006, we have a lot of people that have died and no one has been held accountable – there are thousands and thousands of people who disappeared and no one is taking care of that, no one is being held accountable.”

'Little evidence elected judges are less corrupt'

Despite the widespread consensus that Mexico’s justice system was rife with graft, though, not everyone is convinced that AMLO’s reforms will actually address the root problem.

“While the Mexican judiciary is in dire need of reform, it is not clear that the popular election of judges is the best way to address its shortcomings,” Flores-Macias said. “There is little evidence from international experiences that elected judges are less corrupt or less prone to serve special interests than non-elected ones.”

While the US and Switzerland both allow direct elections for local judges, Bolivia made headlines in 2009 by becoming the first country to elect the nation’s top judges by popular vote. It has not been an unmitigated success – following opposition calls to boycott the elections, the shortlists put forward by the ruling Movement to Socialism party have found themselves elected with little real popular support.

As for the ever-present threat of cartel corruption in the courts, Flores-Macias said, it was hard to see how this reform on its own would keep judges free from temptation.

“Corruption in the Mexican judiciary is widespread, and it is naive to think that judges aren't already on the payroll of organised crime,” he said. “The election of judges is unlikely to change this, as organised crime co-opts elected officials across branches and levels of government.”

One-party rule?

For other critics, though, the reforms are not merely insufficient, but a threat to the very idea of an independent judiciary. Centeno said that the elections would almost inevitably lead to a justice system dominated by judges favoured by the powerful ruling party.

“In principle, there wouldn’t be any problem with the election of judges,” he said. “But what needs to be taken into account in the case of Mexico is that there is only one electoral machine that can run great campaigns in order to get people elected, and that’s the current party governing Mexico, which is Morena.”

Centeno said he believed that the reform was more motivated by AMLO’s increasingly acrimonious relationship with the Supreme Court than an authentic attempt to tackle judicial corruption. The outgoing president has repeatedly clashed with the Supreme Court over some of his landmark policies, including proposed staffing cuts to Mexico’s independent electoral commission and an attempt to place the civilian-run – though largely military – National Guard under direct military control. Both were struck down as unconstitutional.

“This reform to have judges elected will basically mean that those that are aligned with the Morena party are the only ones who will win,” he said. “Which means Morena will control every institution.”

Flores-Macias said that the fight against corruption in the justice system would likely go on long past the first elected judges took office.

“Strict anti-corruption mechanisms are crucial for a well-functioning judiciary regardless of whether judges are elected or not, as well as the protection of judges who might face retaliation for their rulings,” he said.

Centeno said that corrupt judges were only one part of what was standing between the Mexican people and access to justice.

“The problem is at the bottom, the people in charge of the judicial system that everyday Mexicans actually see when they seek justice,” he said. “We need more personnel, and more well-prepared personnel.”

He said that without better training and funding for police and prosecutors, cases would be dead in the water before they ever made it to the newly elected judges.

“What commonly happens here is that a policeman arrests someone, but he doesn’t actually know how to proceed step by step,” he said. “So when they take someone, maybe taken in flagrante, they take that person to the judge – the judge sees that the protocol wasn’t followed and that person arrested is released free again. The great problems of the judicial system are at the micro level, not the macro one.”