MEXICO CITY (CN) — Mexico’s Senate approved a bill late Tuesday night to eliminate more than a dozen special budgetary funds belonging to the country’s judicial branch, including employee pension and benefits funds.
The bill cuts all but one of 14 funds used by the judiciary for everything from pensions to administration to healthcare benefits, totaling around $865 million. It passed with a simple majority just after midnight, following more than eight hours of heated debate on the Senate floor.
The funds are the latest battleground in a campaign headed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and ruling Morena party legislators against Mexico’s judiciary. The president has called the governmental branch “rotten” and proposed to overhaul it by electing Supreme Court justices by popular vote, among other reforms.
Two Morena senators — Olga Sánchez Cordero and Alejandro Díaz Durán — broke with their party and voted against the bill.
“I’ve come to defend a principle of republicanism: that of the autonomy of the powers of the union to define their own ways, times and administration,” said Sánchez, herself a former Supreme Court justice, during debate.
The Senate vote capped off a week of controversy, as the bill prompted unionized workers in the federal judiciary to call for a work stoppage and take to the streets to protest.
“They aren’t eliminating privileges, they’re eliminating checks and balances,” said an administrative employee of the judiciary, who preferred not to give their name, at a protest outside the Senate on Tuesday.
The cuts will affect the benefits of over 50,000 federal employees, supporters and opposition senators said.
Police estimated that more than 1,000 people protested at multiple federal buildings around the city Tuesday.
López Obrador has derided the protests, calling them a “social sin” and accusing striking employees of “defending privileges” of corrupt people at the top of the judiciary’s hierarchy.
“How are they going to defend those who live with overflowing attention, with privileges?” he said last week.
López Obrador has sparred with Mexico’s high court and its judicial branch over several issues, from energy policy to electoral reform, as well as over efforts to change the country’s mandatory pretrial detention system.
To hear him tell it, the funds targeted by the bill allow the upper echelons of the judiciary to live lavish lifestyles while they release members of organized crime from prison in droves.
But the elimination of the funds will indeed affect judiciary employees’ pensions, according to legal scholars.
“It’s incredible how he can make these kinds of claims that are manifestly false,” said Javier Martín Reyes, a law professor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.
Two of the targeted funds were created expressly for complementary pensions and benefits, Reyes said, which are extremely important for average workers, as their regular monthly salaries are quite low.
Protesters confirmed the importance of the funds to their livelihoods.
“These are our labor rights, our health benefits and salaries, they all come together to provide the minimum of what we need to get by,” said Germán Faena, who works in a district court administration.
But the issue doesn’t come down only to his monthly paycheck. For Faena and others at Tuesday’s protest, it was also about the principle of separation of powers.
“Both are equally important,” he said. “We can’t say that one is more important than the other.”
The issue also worries members of Mexico’s legal community. Legal scholar Rodrigo Brito Melgarejo called it a “dangerous initiative, because it could hurt judicial independence.”
Judicial independence has become a recurring concern during the López Obrador administration. A questionable Supreme Court ruling on his electricity reform and the creative way the votes were counted first raised eyebrows over the executive branch’s influence on the judiciary in April 2022.
Brito considered the bill another volley in the ongoing media quarrel between Mexico’s branches of government — one which could paradoxically cause more corruption rather than curb it.
“The purpose of these funds is to have some kind of resources that aren’t subject to budgetary fluctuations,” he said. “They exist precisely to avoid people working in the judiciary turning to acts of corruption.”
The lower house of Congress approved the measure last week; the bill now goes to the president’s desk for signing, a move that is all but guaranteed.
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