Persons indicated of connections with signs and serious crimes appear on the tickets of the first judicial elections held in Mexico tomorrow, which enlivens the fear that organized crime can exert its influence on the vote.
One spent more than five years in an American prison for trying to smile methamphetamine. Another was involved in a scandal that involved journalists killed. At least four have faced investigations for crimes such as sexual abuse or organized crime.
These are just some of the candidates who compete for positions of judges and magistrates in the first judicial elections of Mexico, which will be held tomorrow and are called to transform the judiciary of the country, including the Supreme Court of Justice.
The reform has opened the door to more than seven thousand candidates, changing the judiciary of a system based on appointments to another in which voters choose the judges and there are few requirements to present themselves.
The changes were promoted last year by the former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and backed by his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum. They have argued that the measure would infuse more independence from the Judiciary, would eradicate corruption and, by allowing citizens to select the judges, democratize the judiciary.
However, some critics and legal experts said that, on the contrary, the measure could erode judicial independence and expand the influence of the ruling party, Morena. They affirmed that the election to cover two thousand 681 judicial posts runs the risk of converting the courts into a politicized organ defined by popularity, not by legal experience, and more vulnerable to external influence.
The criminal groups have already infiltrated local governments, security forces and the sectors of the economy in broad stripes of Mexico. The fact that they appear in the candidate ballots accused of criminal ties has fed further the fear that organized crime has found ways to “guarantee that its tentacles reach the judicial system,” said Amrit Singh, professor at Stanford’s Faculty of Law, who has analyzed the Mexican experiment.
“It is very easy to imagine a situation in which organized crime comes to influence the elections, directly or indirectly, and in the votes received by a judge.”
The leaders of Morena have publicly subtracted the risks, qualifying the presence of some candidates of simple “human errors.” Sheinbaum has also dismissed concerns and defended the system.
“Every process is perfectible, everything. But from our perspective it is better to do in this way what we had before or what we still have today, where there is nepotism, corruption,” he said last month. “We are talking about a tiny, tiny percentage, of all the candidates who went through the investigation process.”
However, even members of the Sheinbaum party have tried to block some candidates.
“We were some cases,” Gerardo Fernández Noroña, president of the Mexican Senate and member of Morena, told the press in April. “They should not participate. They do not meet the constitutional demand for probity.”
With the old system, to be appointed magistrate, a candidate had to be internally promoted on the basis of exams, training and performance evaluations. The norms were designed to guarantee qualified candidates, but did not avoid problems such as corruption.
To present themselves to Sunday’s elections, candidates had to meet basic requirements: be a law degree, have some professional experience and lack criminal records. They were then evaluated by selection committees, groups of experts gathered by each branch of the Government and in charge of identifying the most qualified candidates.
It is not clear how some people who did not seem to meet the criteria, and supporters of the election have recognized the ballots, have recognized that dubious candidates were sneaked.
In letters viewed by The New York Times, The presidents of both Changes of Congress – where Morena has supermayories – asked the country’s electoral authority to exclude 18 candidates who, they said, did not meet the constitutional requirement of having “good reputation.”
The Attorney General’s Office has investigated at least four of the candidates for crimes such as sexual abuse or organized crime, according to letters, which were sent in early May. Two more had worked as defense lawyers of posters. The rest were suspicious of being involved with criminal groups or having favored them in some way.
“If not canceling the records of these candidates, the jurisdictional function was seriously compromised,” the letters said. But according to the new standards, the National Electoral Institute, an institution that organizes the elections and supervises the vote, can only review and disable candidates after the electoral day.
The Institute will evaluate the profiles of the candidate that receives the most votes in each contest. Factors such as having a criminal record, being a registered sexual offender, being sought for a crime or having a history of domestic violence could disqualify some candidates, which could lead to their dismissal.
“Of course, we are shocked that someone defended drug traffickers,” said Norma Irene de la Cruz Magaña, a member of the Governing Council of the Institute. “But, is it enough to disqualify? I don’t know.”
Fernando Escamilla, a 32-year-old candidate for state criminal judge in the northern state of Nuevo León, offered legal services to Miguel Ángel Treviño, a notoriously brutal leader of the Los Zetas cartel, and Eleazar Medina-Rojas, another high-ranking member of the same cartel.
Escamilla has acknowledged having worked for Medina-Rojas. But he said in an interview that in the case of Treviño, who was captured in Mexico in 2013 and is believed to be responsible for the murders of dozens of people, he limited himself to providing legal advice on extradition laws to the defense team.
Disable it for this reason, said Escamilla, would be “unfair” and “discriminatory for the free exercise of the legal profession”, adding that all Mexican citizens have the right to adequate legal defense.
“It’s like a doctor,” he said. “When patients come to the emergency room, they don’t ask them what they are doing before giving them attention, just attend them and now.”
Francisco Herrera Franco, former -demal of a region of the state of Michoacán, resigned from that position after a recording came to light in which he seemed to advise a man, accused of being the leader of a cartel, on how to manipulate the charges related to a murder. He has denied that the voice of the recording is yours, and does not face criminal charges.
It was also involved in the case of two journalists who had reported on accusations of corruption against them and who subsequently appeared dead. One of those journalists had filed a complaint against Herrera Franco and other state officials, stating that he had received death threats and feared for his life, according to official documents. Herrera Franco has denied any implication in cases.
Now Herrera Franco appears as a candidate for criminal judge in Michoacán.
Unlike the United States, where lawyers must follow strict codes of conduct or face disqualification, Mexico’s Bar Associations barely supervise their members. Although many lawyers representing people with criminal links act within legal limits, others serve as key intermediaries between cartels and business leaders or corrupt officials, and even help coordinate illegal operations.
Other candidates are controversial for reasons not related to cartels advice.
In 2015, Leopoldo Javier Chávez Vargas was arrested in Laredo, Texas, for trying to smuggle in the United States almost two kilos of methamphetamine and served almost six years of conviction in a federal prison. He is now a candidate for a federal judge in the state of Durango.
In an interview, Chávez Vargas said his story is “of transformation, not repetition.”
“Not evoked my past,” he said, adding that his experience allows him to “better understand” the failures of the system and the effect he has on people. “I have fully assumed the consequences.”
Jesús Humberto Padilla Briones, who aspires to be elected criminal judge in Nuevo León, was arrested in 2023 accused of traffic with 15 bags of methamphetamine and illegally carrying a weapon, according to judicial documents. He was subsequently put on probation, and did not respond to comments requests.
The problem in many of these cases, according to experts and rights defenders, is reduced to inappropriate and hastily designed evaluation methods.
“It would seem that they didn’t even google to some of these candidates,” said Miguel Alfonso Meza, anti -corruption activist and defender’s director, a Mexican surveillance group.
The officials in charge of the National Team have defended their work, stating that they requested criminal records and verifications of the background of the candidates.
“We were exhaustive to achieve all this information,” said Andrés García Repper, who participated in an evaluation committee and is now a candidate in the state of Tamaulipas. “If two cases of among more than 12 thousand are filtered, well, because that speaks just the percentage of work effectiveness.”
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The García Repeper committee approved the candidacies of at least four men accused of serious crimes, including Chávez Vargas and Padilla Briones.
“The problem is not in the events that we already know about these ‘problematic’ candidates,” said Alberto Zinser, one of the most prominent criminal lawyers in Mexico. “It is what we do not know about the thousands of candidates that we are going to vote.”