The destruction of legality in Mexico continues, as you know. Although we have never truly lived under a rule of law, we came fairly close starting in 1995. Thirty years later, the Judiciary has been dismantled and replaced with “judges” elected through an absurd, rigged, and, strictly speaking, illegitimate process.
It is possible that some of those elected have some knowledge of their post, but there are plenty of examples of people now making decisions on matters they know nothing about — with no understanding of procedures, and not even of the laws on which their rulings should be based. The Court’s sessions are downright embarrassing.
In Mexico, the law has never been the axis around which society functions. From the very first viceroy, we chose to administer the law’s application to avoid unmanageable conflicts. We reaffirmed that attitude in the following century and since then maintained a distant relationship with the Crown and its laws. Although we love formalism and seize every chance to draft constitutions — or expand them endlessly — abiding by what’s written has never been our strength.
As in any society, law is a last resort. Daily coexistence is governed by customs and traditions, and only when these break down does one resort to laws and to those who enforce them. In our case, that last resort has rarely been used (except during the period mentioned earlier). The police are neither respected by the population nor very interested in enforcing the law. Before letting things get that far, we tend to live by the saying that “a bad settlement is better than a good lawsuit.”
Consequently, we have been a country of endless negotiations — which, when we disapprove, we call deals under the table. If someone wanted to invest in car production, they had to negotiate with the government, whose representatives demanded bribes or even ownership stakes. Defending land ownership often meant negotiating with authorities, notaries, and squatters — sometimes with gunfire to speed things along. We negotiate social peace, the economy, “urban development”… everything.
The result is the tangled mess we’ve turned the country into — cities without order, entirely excluded groups, privileged families, politicians dedicated to looting, and increasingly large groups constructing parallel states (better known as organized crime). The civilizational process that might have established a genuine rule of law began only thirty years ago, and we have now destroyed it.
The destruction is the work of the group currently in power, which believes that returning to the old tradition of negotiation will allow it to perpetuate its rule and expand its plunder — already the largest in national history. While the initial dismantling can be blamed on the previous president (with the complicity of the current one), the elimination of amparo is entirely her doing.
Some claim the reform was aimed at punishing Salinas Pliego for debts the government alleges he owes, but the result is the defenselessness of all Mexicans. Any day, without warning, you could wake up to find your bank accounts frozen — with no way to defend yourself. Between mandatory pretrial detention, account freezes, politically motivated prosecutors, incompetent judges, and a farcical Supreme Court, we are defenseless and without legal protection.
In the past, when something like this has happened, the result was a process of disintegration marked by violence. One of those took half a century to bring under control; the other, only half as long. If there are no rules applied equally to all, and depending on the size of the toad goes the stone, then — as the saying goes — he who has more spit swallows more pinole. Defenseless, stoned, and choking, it is impossible to remain united.