By Kathleen Bohné
Below you will find three excerpts from the Feb. 20 edition of “La Semana” newsletter. To read the complete articles and to subscribe, please visit www.themexpatriate.com.
Pretrial detention is limited in ruling by Supreme Court
“For guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will
say, ‘whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,’ and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.” John Adams, 1770
Álvaro is a 53 year-old tinsmith who has been in prison in Mexico City for three years awaiting trial. Police picked him up because he was driving a car witnesses claimed was similar to one used to rob a milk delivery truck. The initial charge was robbery, but unfortunately for Álvaro, it was then changed to secuestro express (express kidnapping) which is one of the crimes that merits prisión preventiva oficiosa (automatic pre-trial detention). Álvaro’s case was brought to the Mexican Supreme Court (SCJN) in July 2021 and on Feb. 9, the court ruled that pre-trial detention should be reviewed by a judge after two years and can be revoked, regardless of the severity of the alleged crime. This allows for Álvaro’s possible release. In anticipation of the court’s ruling, Netzaí Sandoval, the director of the Federal Institute for Public Defense (IFDC), described this decision as potentially “historic”. There are at least 900 similar open cases, according to the federal agency, in which defendants have been in prison awaiting trial for anywhere between four and eighteen years.
“Yes, clearly the Constitution says that for these kinds of crimes automatic pre-trial detention is indicated at the beginning of the process, but this does not mean that it can be extended indefinitely,” explains Sandoval. The Constitution also declares that the maximum period a person can be imprisoned without trial is two years, so how has this happened?
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Emilio Lozoya: guilty of keeping the bribes he confessed to taking
After a five-year investigation, the Mexican Attorney General’s Office (FGR) concluded that the ex-CEO of Pemex, Emilio Lozoya, personally retained the $10 million USD in bribes given to him by the Brazilian construction giant, Odebrecht. Lozoya alleged that he had been instructed to use the money to facilitate the passage of energy reform laws in 2013 but investigators found instead evidence of his personal use of the monies. The bribes were part of Odebrecht’s strategy to be awarded contracts in the modernization of the Tula refinery owned by Pemex.
The Lozoya case has been one of the highest-profile in this administration’s proclaimed battle against corruption, connecting a number of top Mexican politicians and officials to the kraken of international corruption scandals known as Odebrecht. The nefarious business tactics of the giant Brazilian company were uncovered in 2014 and in the years since, heads of state and other prominent figures across Latin America have been exposed. The company had a bribery division devoted exclusively to assuring access to contracts by paying off officials all over Latin America and the Caribbean: the company paid out $780 million USD in bribes since 2001.
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What is “la cuarta transformación?”
If you’ve spent any time perusing Mexican news or trying to engage in the national conversation, you will inevitably have encountered “la cuarta transformación”, sometimes abbreviated to “La 4T.” The term has become as loaded as “Make America Great Again”: aspirational for one political tribe while mocked by the other. Unlike most political slogans however, this phrase references the policies of President López Obrador and his party (MORENA), as well as the social movement behind them. The concept of “la cuarta transformación” was first used by AMLO on the campaign trail in 2018: “We will undertake a peaceful, orderly transformation, but no less profound than the [War for] Independence, the Reform and the Revolution; we have not come this far to make superficial changes, and much less, to have more of the same.” His landslide victory in 2018—after his third run for the presidency—brought a leftist government into power for the first time in decades.
The three previous “transformations” were notably violent and did irrevocably change the country’s power structure. In 1810, New Spain embarked on a war for independence after 300 years of colonial rule. It took eleven years and cost up to 500,000 lives; by 1824, the first president of the United Mexican States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos), Guadalupe Victoria, was elected by congress.
The Reform war from 1858-61 pitted liberals promulgating the Constitution of 1857 that separated church and state against conservatives aligned with the Catholic church and the Mexican army. The liberals and their leader, Benito Juárez, won the war, then lost the country to a French intervention and brief rule by a puppet emperor (Hapsburg archduke Maximillian). Maximillian was executed in 1867 and Juárez was president until his death in 1872.The Revolution of 1910-20 toppled the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and birthed the Constitution of 1917, which continues in effect today. The war devastated the country with an estimate of 1.4 million lives lost to violence, disease (the notorious influenza epidemic of 1918 killed approximately 500,000) and starvation. One of the prominent political legacies of the Revolution was land reform, which redistributed lands that previously had been owned by a handful of hacendados and worked, in a form of serfdom, by campesinos.
