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By KELIN DILLON

According to an anonymous complaint filed against the Mexican Supreme Court Justice of the Nation’s (SCJN) former President Arturo Zaldívar with the Federal Judiciary Council (CJF), Zaldívar allegedly pressured Mexico’s federal judges to facilitate President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) multi-billion-dollar cancellation of the New Mexico City International Airport (NAICM), as well as ordering them not to intervene against the presidential administration’s will.

The complaint purports that Carlos Antonio Alpízar, the former secretary general of the CJF under Zaldívar’s presidency, threatened Judges Jorge Arturo Camero Ocampo and Amparo Hernández Chong not to hinder any proceedings against the NAICM’s termination – and subsequently, the construction of AMLO’s replacement project, the Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA). 

“They were threatened by telephone and in person with the initiation of proceedings, redescriptions, suspensions and disqualifications, warnings that in the end were followed through on,” read the claim.

After refusing to comply with Alpízar’s requests, Judge Hernández Chong was reportedly moved from their position at the Sixth Collegiate Court in Administrative Matters to the Fourth Collegiate Court in Civil Matters in retaliation, despite having no experience in this area of law.

For his part, Judge Camero Ocampo – who voted against the construction of the AIFA due to its unstudied environmental impacts and effects on local indigenous communities – was supposedly retaliated against by being retried for a matter that had previously been resolved.

Camero Ocampo was then publicly lambasted by Zaldívar and AMLO during the federal executive’s daily morning press conferences, during which López Obrador accused the federal judge of corruption and of receiving an 80 million peso bribe. The allegations effectively destroyed Camero Ocampo’s multi-decade career, which could not be resolved before his death eight months later from cancer.

The complaint also claimed that other judges who resisted Zaldívar’s orders to not vote against the wishes of the AMLO administration were suspended from their duties or publicly humiliated, forcing some magistrates into early resignation.

The complaint is presently under investigation by the CJF while Zaldívar goes after the impeachment of current SCJN President Norma Piña for admitting the anonymous petition into review.