Mexican Supreme Court Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar. Photo: Wikipedia

By KELIN DILLON

A new survey conducted by El Financiero revealed that 62 percent of Mexicans disagree with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) proposal to extend Supreme Court of Justice (SCJN) President Arturo Zaldívar’s term by two years, showing the general population, like many experts on the matter, disagree with AMLO’s blatant attempt to expand his power and potentially set the precedent to extend his own presidential term come 2024.

Journalist Enrique Quintana said he believes the plot behind AMLO’s actions stem from trying to “test the social and political effect of an extension of the term of a senior official,” potentially gearing up for López Obrador to extend his own presidency in 2024 if Zaldívar’s extension were to be well received by the public.

For his part, López Obrador vehemently denied any underlying motives with the extension proposal, insisting he would retire from politics at the end of his six-year term, and pushed the narrative that Zaldívar, a longtime friend of AMLO, should be kept on for his “honesty.”

Ironically, AMLO also said in his defense that “judges, magistrates and ministers are required to be at the service of the people, not at the service of the interests of created groups,” while simultaneously fighting to keep on a judge who primarily serves the president’s own interests above all others.

A member of AMLO’s very own leftist National Regeneration Movement (Morena) and former founder of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) Porfirio Muñoz Ledo expressed his disdain at the idea, saying the extension is “pathetically unconstitutional and would annul the division of powers and could lead to the dissolution of the republican government regime.”

“It is a coup d’état proposed by those who wish to seize all power in 2024, aimed at laying the foundations of an authoritarian regime and the disappearance of the system of division of powers,” warned the Morena deputy in a statement released to his Twitter account.

“We would place ourselves before the dead end of a constitutional crisis in which the constituted powers themselves would violate their actions in relation to one another.”

The proposal was already approved in the Senate on Thursday, April 15, and now must go to the Chamber of Deputies for final approval, but if there is anything the first two years of López Obrador’s presidency has shown, it is that he always gets his way, whether unconstitutional or not, and if the extension is approved by his lackeys as anticipated, it can be expected that come 2024, we will not have seen the end of AMLO’s presidency.

…April 21, 2021