Andrea Becerril and Georgina Saldierna
La Jornada newspaper
Thursday, September 18, 2025, p. 8
The Plenary of the Senate rejected yesterday grant a license for more than six months to Judge Ireland Gabriela Pacheco Torres, who intended to leave the position of the District Court in Criminal Matters of the First Circuit of Mexico City, to continue in another job, that of the General Director of the evaluation of the National Customs Agency of Mexico.
The Senate Justice Commission, chaired by Javier Corral (Morena), modified during the morning the opinion distributed last Friday and that it came in a positive sense, to replace it with another that rejected that the judge be absent, until March 2026, of its jurisdictional functions.
The judge’s argument in the sense that the high position he performs in Customs “demands an orderly, transparent and responsible closure of the ongoing processes, in order to ensure an adequate delivery of responsibilities,” he was discarded by the legislators of all political forces, who criticized “the lack of ethics” of the judge.
The final vote in the Plenary was 90 votes in favor and 11 abstentions of the PRI senators.
In Tribuna, Carolina Viggiano said that this case is an example of a “poorly designed” judicial reform, which opened the door to people without vocation, without the appropriate ethical profile. He even accused Pacheco Torres of having been a lawyer for a drug trafficker and lamented that he still competed in Iztapalapa, Bastion de Morena.
When presenting the opinion, Senator Corral explained that with that first case a precedent was sat on, since it was defined that in the requests of judicial licenses the right to justice of citizens will be privileged.
It was determined that permission is not justified, since it had enough time, three months, to close the responsibility for employment in customs before protesting as a judge, on September 1.
In the morning, the senators of Morena Saúl Monreal and Malú Micher spoke not only for denying the license application, but for demanding the resignation of Judge Pacheco Torres, who was elected last July 1 at the polls, he gave protest on September 1 and a day later he was already sending the request to the request to absent.
PAN Guadalupe Murguía and Emecista Alejandra Barrales asked to account for the situation of the judicial discipline and the judicial administration body.
Corral explained that it did not correspond to the Senate to decide on that point, only to reject the license application, and the also Morenista Manuel Huerta Ladrón de Guevara stressed that a clear message is left: “Justice is not half -administered or freezed or freezed by particular interests.”
In the event that Pacheco renounces and stays in customs, another judge would assume the position that had obtained the following highest vote in the June election.
