Alonso Urrutia and Arturo Sánchez
The newspaper La Jornada
Friday, August 30, 2024, p. 4
After the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Branch of the Federation (TEPJF) confirmed the allocation of plurinominal legislators, which gives Morena and its allies the qualified majority required to reform the Constitution, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador asked the opposition to remain calm. It has already been shown that we are not extremists, what we want is for there to be authentic democracy in Mexico
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In his morning press conference yesterday, the president demanded that his party’s legislators be very careful in the parliamentary process of the planned package of reforms, to avoid the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) revoking any amendments for procedural reasons. The more protection is provided, the better. They should have notaries, a notarial act. They should take care because they are capable of many things.
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With the confirmation of the qualified majority for the ruling party in the Chamber of Deputies, the President considered that everything is moving forward to achieve the constitutional changes that he is promoting.
With this correlation, he stressed, it will be possible to incorporate into the Magna Carta the adjustments to social programs and approve the reform to the Judicial Branch, which will allow the election of judges, magistrates and ministers by citizens.
He called on law students at UNAM not to let themselves be manipulated by the professors. He pointed out that among the professors of the program at that university is the man who was Attorney General when Luis Donaldo Colosio was murdered in 1994, and who was quick to say that there was a lone assassin.
He was referring to Diego Valadés, whom he did not mention by name. He mentioned his time as a minister of the SCJN for only a few months, from where he left after Ernesto Zedillo’s reform, which in 1995 dissolved that court in exchange for millionaire pensions for its members. Because they had worked for a short time, they have been collecting a pension of 250 thousand pesos for 30 years, he said about Valadés.
Just so that young people have all this information: what does the reform mean? It means cleaning up that corruption, so that these abuses never happen again. It is about ending hypocrisy, because it turns out that these gentlemen present themselves as white doves and want to teach us about legality, about the rule of law. What rule of law, if they embody the state of crookedness, of bribery?
López Obrador also recalled the conclusion of the electoral process and congratulated the advisors of the National Electoral Institute and the magistrates of the TEPJF, because, he stressed, they adhered to the Constitution when assigning plurinominal deputies and senators and resisted pressures.
In contrast, he described as irresponsible the actions of the Chief Justice of the SCJN, Norma Piña, in accepting a request filed by the PAN to decide how to assign plurinominal seats, a matter that is the exclusive jurisdiction of the TEPJF.
“How can the President of the Court accept the appeal if it is clearly contrary to the Constitution? Not only does she accept it, but she also refers it to a judge to decide. And that judge, however passive he may have been, becomes congruent and says: ‘No, I cannot do this, it violates the Constitution.'”
