Notebook News - June 2025

Mexico elects judges as ruling party tightens its grip

Mexico’s wildly-popular ruling party, MORENA, has taken control of the country’s new Supreme Court, after controversial reforms paved the way for the election of its judges this month. The judiciary is set to become both less professional and less independent as a result. President Claudia Scheinbaum can expect fewer judicial objections to her reforms than those faced by her predecessor and mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as Mexico seems to be walking back towards the clientist system of patronage that characterized its politics in the 20th Century.

On June 1st, Mexicans had the chance to vote for the members of a new-look Supreme Court as well as around 2,600 other judges from all levels of the judiciary, as Mexico became one of the only countries to elect all of its judges. The reforms, passed into law by the outgoing president López Obrador last summer raise concerns about the independence of the judiciary and the ability of the judicial branch to act as a check on executive power.

Since MORENA gained a majority in congress in 2018, the party’s “fourth transformation” agenda has been repeatedly frustrated by the judiciary. The Supreme Court rejected reform of the electoral system as unconstitutional, while regional courts delayed ex-president López Obrador’s signature infrastructure project, Tren Maya (Mayan Train), on environmental grounds. López Obrador took to railing against judges whose rulings he didn’t appreciate and declaring them enemies of the people. Now, MORENA has the Supreme Court that it wants and control over all three branches of government.

With the votes all counted, three Supreme Court judges appointed by López Obrador during his presidency return to their posts, while the other eight declined to run. Among the new judges of the new 9-seat court are López Obrador’s former legal advisor and an academic who contributed to López Obrador’s judicial reform initiative. The court’s president will be another of López Obrador’s associates, Hugo Aguilar Ortiz, an indigenous lawyer from Oaxaca who played a vital role in securing the consent of indigenous communities for Tren Maya.

President Claudia Scheinbaum has claimed that the judicial reforms make Mexico the most democratic country in the world, but turnout was disappointing for the ruling party. While 58% turned out in her widely-foreseen triumph in the presidential elections last year, fewer than 13% came out to vote for the judiciary with a high proportion of votes spoiled. Opposition parties had encouraged their supporters to stay home so as not to lend legitimacy to a hastily organized and poorly thought-through electoral process. Candidates were not allowed to be identified by party affiliation – judges being nominally independent – yet, lists of MORENA-approved candidates were made available at polling stations to ensure the vote was a “success” despite the low-turnout.

Defenders of the reform quite fairly point out that Mexico’s courts are nepotistic and inefficient, and that reform was needed. Yet, as the country incorporates new judges – many of whom have never been judges, but simply have a law degree – it is likely that the backlog of cases will only grow. The nepotism seems set to continue, with the only difference that now MORENA are the ones handing out the jobs.

Mining lobby gains momentum in Panama

The President of Panama, José Raúl Mulino, has taken the first steps to reopening Latin America’s largest open-pit copper mine, which closed in 2023 after massive nationwide protests. Communities affected by pollution and destruction of the environment as a result of the mine are still awaiting justice.

Cobre Panama which used to produce about 1.5% of the world’s copper supply, closed in 2023 after anti-mining protests brought the country to a standstill. Preparations are reportedly underway to ship 120,000 metric tonnes of semi-processed copper to Canada which has been trapped since the mine closed 20 months ago, a move which has opened the way for one of the mine´s primary financiers, Franco-Nevada, to suspend a $5 billion dollar arbitration against the Panamanian state for lost profits. Aware of the anti-mining sentiment in the country, Mulino has stressed that reopening the mine is “not imminent” and that any deal to reopen it would have a “nationalist” character.

The Cobre Panama copper mine used to employ 1 in every 50 workers in Panama, accounting for between 4 and 5% of the country’s GDP. The Canadian mining conglomerate, First Quantum Minerals, that ran the mine through a subsidiary paid remarkably little tax and made a healthy profit. Then, in 2023, when the government tried to negotiate a new 20-year contract for exploitation of the mine, including exploration rights over 32,000 acres of rainforest, a broad and diverse coalition of groups and viewpoints began to object. After 250,000 people took to the streets in a country of 4.4 million, closing down highways and ports, the Supreme Court intervened to declare the new contract unconstitutional. First Quantum are seeking $20 billion in damages from the country.

The protesters’ grievances included the devastating environmental impact of the open-pit mine on Panama’s pristine forests; the suffering of indigenous communities; resentment at the exceptionally low rate of tax that First Quantum’s Zimbabwean founder, Philip Pascal, had secured for his company; the conviction that a new colonial enclave was being created in Panama, similar to that which endured around the Panama Canal until 1999; and, the possibility of the mine’s water usage competing with the freshwater needs of the canal, amongst other concerns.

President Mulino, who replaced the centre-left Laurentino Cortizo shortly after the mine’s closure, is an investor-friendly conservative who is keen to reopen the mine. A deal to move-on the semi-processed copper has allowed him to temporarily alleviate some the pressure of the huge lawsuits hanging over the country without risking a confrontation with those opposed to the mine’s reopening. His assertion that any new agreement with the multinationals will be nationalist in character is a signal that he sees an opportunity to split the broad coalition that came together to oppose the 20-year contract in 2023. Mulino will hope that the anti-colonialist resource nationalists will stomach foreign investment in mining, as long as they feel that Panama is getting a good deal and not giving up too much sovereignty. Meanwhile, the environmentalists and indigenous rights activists are more generally opposed to mining and so will likely reject the open-pit mine’s reopening in any circumstance.

For their part, the indigenous communities based around the site of the mine say that the closure of the mine has not led to a restoration of their rights. Around 4,000 Ngabe people living closest to the mine still endure severe restrictions on their freedom of movement. Meanwhile, local people have suffered outbreaks of deadly gastrointesinal illness which they believe are linked to the pollution of the Pifa River at the mine’s perimeter.