The last appointment of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the Supreme Court has also been the most controversial. The president's choice to fill the vacant seat left by Arturo Zaldívar is Lenia Batres Guadarrama. The lack of agreements in the Senate left the table ready for an unprecedented situation, for the first time the head of the Executive directly appointed a minister, without ratification by the Upper House. In the midst of a prolonged dispute with the Judiciary and claims from the opposition against the concentration of presidential power, López Obrador opted for a woman he fully trusted and was committed to his movement: sister of the head of Government, Martí Batres. ; member of Morena, the ruling party, and its collaborator for more than two decades. The president anticipated it for weeks: he wanted a person loyal and identified with the Fourth Transformation (4T), his political project, in the High Court.
Batres' appointment is the latest result of a multi-party conflict, which began a month ago with the surprise resignation of Zaldívar and his controversial incorporation into the campaign of Claudia Sheinbaum, the official standard bearer in the 2024 presidential elections. The apparent loss from one of his greatest allies in the Judiciary, one of the main counterweights to the president's power, became an opportunity: to appoint a new member of the Court for the fifth time in a single six-year term. “I'm going to start to see who I propose, to see if I'm lucky and hit it because I've proposed four and two came out.” preserves [conservadores]“said the president at the beginning of November.
López Obrador's message also meant a warning that the rules of the political game had changed. In addition to Batres, he included in his first shortlist Bertha Alcalde Luján, sister of the Secretary of the Interior (Luisa María Alcalde) and daughter of the former president of the National Council of Morena (Bertha Luján), and the legal advisor to the presidency, María Estela Ríos . All the profiles were close to his Government. Without concealment or insinuations, the president wanted to reduce the margin of error to the maximum. Batres came in second place, far from being ratified by the Upper House in that first attempt. Along with Mayor Luján, she repeated in the second shortlist and was the most voted for by the senators, but without enough support to be ratified. The failure of the Legislative gave a unique opportunity to the Legislative, with the path clear for the direct appointment of her favorite.
“Lenia Batres has extensive experience in the Federal and local Public Administration,” reads the statement from the Ministry of the Interior about the chosen one, who until this Thursday served as deputy advisor for Legislation and Regulatory Studies of the Legal Department of The presidency. Previously, she was a federal deputy, a member of the first National Council of Morena, an advisor to López Obrador during his time as head of the capital's government and a member of the “legitimate government” installed after the 2006 election. She also advised Claudia Sheinbaum when she was head Tlalpan delegation. In 2003 she was the candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, a formation in which she was active until 2013, in Benito Juárez, the main PAN bastion in Mexico City. “4T,” it still reads in her X biography, before her Twitter.
The political and family genealogy of Batres Guadarrama ignited the debate on the autonomy of the institutions to the power in power and the independence of the Judiciary. Unlike other attempts to place figures close to the president in key positions in the Public Administration, such as when this year it was promoted that Mayor Luján be the president of the National Electoral Institute, the ruling bloc has been more transparent in the latest appointment in the Court. Government supporters defend that it was the president's right to nominate a similar profile; They argue that this is how it was done before and that it has always been done, and they maintain that it is a sign of democratic health to be clear about this.
“They are right, the three of them are very linked to us,” said López Obrador at the end of November, “it is a source of pride for me.” The president said on that occasion that Batres has been “fighting for democracy for years” and recognized “also the family” from which he comes. “There may be a minister who is not like the others, or two or three, compared to the vast majority of those who act by slogan and have retrograde thinking,” he defended in the face of criticism from the opposition.
Batres is a lawyer from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a master in Criminal Law and Public Management, and a doctoral candidate in City Studies, according to her Blog staff. He also has diplomas from the Julio Antonio Mella School in Havana, the Metropolitan Autonomous University, the Ibero-American University and the UNAM. When he appeared before the Senate, he shared López Obrador's thesis that the Judiciary needed to be reformed, he assured that the Judiciary has exceeded its functions, he defended the extinction of 13 trusts promoted by the Government and said that he is in favor of Judges and ministers are elected by vote of the citizens. “The power that currently represents the greatest threat to the independence, impartiality and objectivity of the judicial powers is not that of the Government and the legislators; but the power of the market, which has come to subordinate the established powers,” he stated in the upper house. “I do not have, rest assured, any link with those powers.”
Batres also denied that his closeness to the current Government was an obstacle to his candidacy. “The relationships that I have would not condition the resolution of particular controversies, since the convictions of social justice, of respect for personal freedoms, of profound self-government for which I have carried out government functions, are those that I would support in the rulings in which from the Judiciary could now participate,” he added.
The president's vote of confidence seems, however, to be a difficult shadow to overcome. Skepticism is reinforced by the circumstances of the appointment: the clash between the Judicial Branch and the Executive; the direct appointment of the president and without consensus of other political forces; López Obrador's own demand for loyalty, and his family tree, considered one of his main virtues by those who proposed it and as his greatest sin by those who rejected it.
“Judicial independence is an essential pillar of democracy and the protection of rights,” highlights this Thursday a statement from the Supreme Court regarding the annual work report of the president of the court, Norma Piña. Without abandoning her institutional role and before her appointment was confirmed, Piña urged the members of the Judiciary to “bring out the best in ourselves. Not through obstinacy, but through dialogue. Not through sectarianism, but through inclusion. Not through words, but through actions. Not through protagonism, but through active and, above all, collaborative participation.”
After the untimely departure of Zaldívar, the political saga between López Obrador and the Court will continue in February, when the Executive plans to present a new constitutional reform in line with what Batres defended in the Senate a few days ago: the election of ministers and judges by popular vote. In the process, the 4T gained an ally and elected a minister who emerged from its ranks for the first time.
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