Judicial Reform as Insurance Policy: Mexico in the 1990s

On balance, the new institutional rules laid the groundwork for the development of an independent judiciary with the potential to play an active role in Mexico's separation of powers. A look at the specifics of some of the post-1994 decisions provides concrete evidence that Mexico's new Supreme Court is both willing and able to rule against the ruling party and the president on extremely salient political issues.

Postreform Court Rulings Opposing the PRI and the President

The first exercise of the court's new judicial review powers against the PRI occurred in 1998, only four years after Mexico's judicial reform, when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional an electoral law intended to maintain PRI dominance in the state of Quintana Roo.17

PRI legislators, realizing that they would lose control over the Quintana Roo state legislature in the next election, enacted a new state electoral law, known as the governability clause, that would have awarded a majority of legislative seats to the plurality vote winner. Because the PRI expected to garner the largest share of the vote but still under 40 percent, the clause would have guaranteed the PRI's continued unilateral control over the Quintana Roo legislature even though the party polled less than a majority of the vote. In response to the passage of the governability clause, legislators from the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) filed an unconstitutional laws petition with the Supreme Court in August 1998 to challenge the legality of the state's new electoral code. In a unanimous ruling, all 11 justices declared the clause to be unconstitutional. As a result, the law was struck from the state's electoral code, and the PRI's monopoly over political power in Quintana Roo was broken.18

Not only has the court been willing to challenge the PRI at the state level, but the justices have also used their newly acquired judicial review powers to rule against the political elite at the federal level, including the previously sacrosanct presidency. The first challenge to be filed against a Mexican president under the judiciary's new constitutional control powers was brought by the federal congress against Zedillo under constitutional controversies in 1999. At that time, members of Congress from the National Action Party (PAN) and the PRD were attempting to conduct an investigation of alleged illicit bank financing of PRI candidates during the 1994 election, including the funding of Zedillo's presidential campaign. They were stymied by a recalcitrant executive branch.19 PAN and PRD legislators petitioned the court to determine whether the president was obligated to deliver the requested secret banking data to Congress. On August 25, 2000, in another unanimous decision, the justices ordered Zedillo to remand the relevant documents to Congress within 30 days. Zedillo, now at the end of his sexenio, complied with the ruling; the secretary of the treasury and the head of the National Banking Commission delivered the requested files on time. In this case it may be argued that a lame duck president was too weak to ward off judicial encroachment. But the Supreme Court has been just as able to counter the interests of Vicente Fox, even at the beginning of his presidential term.