July 1, 2021
The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, plans to hold a public referendum on August 1 in which Mexicans will be asked whether to prosecute the country's five living former presidents for alleged acts of corruption and human rights abuses.
This referendum will not only be an absurd waste of money in a country that is among the most in need of vaccines against Covid-19 in the world, but it will also be a dangerous escalation of authoritarian populism in the region.
The referendum, which will cost about $ 26 million, will be binding if more than 40 percent of registered voters, or roughly 37 million people, turn out to vote. It will consist of a single question, asking people to vote "yes" or "no" on whether the former heads of state should be tried.
The idea was originally proposed by López Obrador as a referendum that specifically asked whether former Presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994), Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000), Vicente Fox (2000-2006), Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) ) and Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) should be prosecuted. The Supreme Court approved the referendum, but changed the text of the question, replacing the names of the former leaders with a tacit reference to them.
Now the voters will be asked if they agree to "carry out the pertinent actions" within the legal framework "to undertake a process of clarification of the political decisions made in the past years by the political actors." But López Obrador and his Morena party have made it very clear that the referendum refers to the former Presidents. And given Mexico's long history of government corruption and human rights abuses, it is not surprising that many Mexicans support the idea.
But it is a lousy initiative, at the worst possible time. Mexico is one of the countries in the world with the highest mortality rates from Covid-19, with only 23 percent of its population that has been partially vaccinated against the virus, according to a regional vaccination map of the Americas Society and the Council of the Americas. By comparison, 65 percent of Chileans, 63 percent of Uruguayans and 32 percent of Brazilians have been partially vaccinated, according to the same source. The López Obrador government has been a global model of inefficiency in the fight against the pandemic. It should spend every penny of public funds to buy more and better vaccines.
Likewise, the President's consultation is a mockery of the rule of law. Javier Cremades, president of the World Association of Jurists, told me that the referendum:
"shows deep contempt for the courts of law....This is outright populism, political persecution. If there is a crime, there must be a formal accusation, with due process."
José Miguel Vivanco, from the human rights group Human Rights Watch, told me that:
"López Obrador is turning Mexico's justice system into a Roman Circus, where punishments are distributed according to the will of the emperor and the crowd. If the Attorney General of Mexico has evidence that former Presidents, or any other person, have committed crimes, he has a duty to investigate them and, if justified, prosecute them. That duty is not subject to public opinion."
Apart from all this, if a public referendum like this is to be held, López Obrador should be included in the list of officials to be investigated. Government corruption is still alive in Mexico, homicide rates have reached new records, health and education standards have plummeted, and the President has not yet responded to the extremely high death rates from Covid-19 in the country.
In short, the López Obrador referendum has nothing to do with justice. It is a public distraction and a dangerous escalation of authoritarian populism in the region.
*Andres Oppenheimer has been selected by Foreign Policy in Spanish magazine as "one of the 50 most influential Latin American intellectuals." He is a columnist for The Miami Herald, host of the program "Oppenheimer Presenta" on CNN en Español, and author of eight best-sellers. His column "The Oppenheimer Report" is published regularly in more than 50 newspapers, including The Miami Herald in the US, La Nación in Argentina, El Mercurio in Chile, El Comercio in Peru, and Reforma in Mexico.
Oppenheimer was a co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 along with the Miami Herald team that discovered the Iran-Contras scandal, and was distinguished with the two most prestigious awards in Spanish-speaking journalism: the Ortega y Gasset prize from the newspaper El País. of Spain in 1993, and the King of Spain Prize awarded by the EFE agency and the King of Spain in 2001. Twitter: @oppenheimera