Mexico City, Mexico – Senators from Mexico’s ruling MORENA party on Wednesday successfully approved a controversial judicial reform bill after it had already been fast-tracked through the lower house of Congress last week.
The constitutional reform would allow judges and magistrates to be elected by popular vote, which critics — including from within Mexico’s judiciary — worry could undermine the country’s democracy.
The senators were able to muster the necessary majority thanks to an unlikely alliance with Senator Miguel Ángel Yunes Márquez, a former political rival from the National Action Party (PAN) who faces corruption charges.
MORENA, the political party of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who proposed the reform in February, was one vote away from securing its passage on Tuesday when hundreds of people poured into the Senate chambers to protest the bill. When the session resumed, the ruling party secured an alliance with the senator accused of corruption.
MORENA achieved a super-majority in the lower house of Congress in the June 2 general election, but failed to achieve the same in the Senate, which meant the party’s aspirations to pass justice reform were not a foregone conclusion since this week.
After the bill was rushed through the lower house last week, the party worked tirelessly to build enough support in the Senate, including luring two rival senators from the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) on September 10, leading those in the 85 86 votes needed to approve the bill.
Meet Yunes
As MORENA senators scrambled for support and senators from all parties prepared to vote on justice reform, the PAN party reported that Miguel Ángel Yunes Márquez, the senator from the state of Veracruz, was absent.
The senator had missed a key meeting held by the PAN party to reaffirm their opposition to the reform vote and asked for a break just hours before the debate.
As the hours passed, PAN officials reportedly feared that MORENA had approached the senator and his family to make a deal to trade immunity in corruption cases for support for reform, according to PAN head Marko Córtes.
Senator Yunes Márquez faces charges of forging documents to prove his residency in Veracruz when he ran for mayor in 2021, among other things. A district judge issued an arrest warrant in July. The senator responded at the time from Jacksonville, Florida, where he was allegedly receiving medical treatment, that he was being politically persecuted.
On Tuesday, just a few hours before the reform vote, the younger Yunes Márquez appeared in the Senate. Amid some applause and chants of “traitor”, the PAN senator declared his support for the controversial justice reform.
Cortes accused MORENA of colluding with the Yunes family, promising to end investigations against the senator and his family in exchange for their support.
“It is clear that there has been an impunity pact, it is clear that the persecution has ended and Fernando Yunes will be able to take office as a local deputy because we knew that he had an arrest warrant and also had to be out of the country,” Cortes said. . (Fernando Yunes Márquez is the younger brother of Senator Yunes Márquez and is himself accused of corruption in connection with his state congressional campaign in Veracruz in June.)
“I did not come to the Senate to seek personal benefits or political revenge; I came to the Senate to fight for a just Mexico. Man does not betray by acting on his principles; it takes more courage to go against the current than to go with it. Time will tell,” Yunes Márquez said on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday.
