Mexico’s Elected Judges Are in Place, Turnout Was 13 Percent, and the 2027 Round Will Finish the Takeover
Mexico did not dabble with judicial elections. It replaced the appointment system with a ballot and then lived with the result. On June 1, 2025, voters were asked to pick thousands of judges, magistrates, and all nine seats on a shrunken Supreme Court. About 13 percent of eligible voters showed up. Cheat sheets listing Morena-aligned names circulated so widely that election monitors treated them as part of the furniture. Every Supreme Court contender on those lists won. On September 1, 2025, the new bench was sworn in before the Senate. The 2027 round is still on the calendar. That is the takeover in three dates.
The reform itself was signed into the constitution on September 15, 2024, the last major act of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s project and the first inheritance Claudia Sheinbaum had to defend. Popular election of federal judges. A Supreme Court cut from eleven justices to nine. Twelve-year terms. A Judicial Disciplinary Tribunal with the power to punish sitting judges. “Faceless” judges for organized-crime dockets. Salaries capped so no justice out-earns the president. Lifetime pensions for ministers gone. Washington and Ottawa called it a risk to USMCA. Morena called it democracy. Turnout called it something closer to a managed ritual.
Who actually sits on the court
Hugo Aguilar Ortiz, a Mixtec lawyer from Oaxaca, took the most votes of any Supreme Court candidate — just over 6.1 million, about 5.3 percent of the ballots in that race — and became chief justice. He is the first Indigenous person to lead the court since Benito Juárez. He once advised Zapatista communities and later worked inside the state on files that included the Maya Train. Activists who wanted a symbol got one. Analysts who wanted distance from the ruling party did not.
Three holdover justices appointed under López Obrador — Lenia Batres, Yasmín Esquivel, and Loretta Ortiz — won new terms. The bench now decides cases in full-court sessions, with six of nine votes required for a binding ruling. Human Rights Watch said the process was likely to make the judiciary “more loyal to the government.” Reforma described a backlog that had already swollen past 550,000 unresolved federal cases by the end of July 2025 after retirements and a thinner budget.
Silvia Delgado, a former lawyer for Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, won a criminal judgeship in Ciudad Juárez. That one result did more to explain investor panic than a dozen ambassador cables. A system sold as an anti-corruption cleanse produced a winner whose last famous client was the most famous trafficker in the hemisphere.
Why the United States and Canada flinched
Canadian Ambassador Graeme Clark said investors wanted a stable bench that would enforce contracts. The U.S. embassy had already called the reform a threat to independent justice and labor courts required under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. The 2026 USMCA review was never going to ignore a judiciary that the ruling party could campaign for with printed acordeones.
That foreign anxiety is not a moral argument by itself. Mexico’s old appointment system was not a temple. It produced leaky selection processes, sold information, and a bench that U.S. counsel often found comfortable when nationalist statutes were on the table. Former Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar tried an internal cleanup in 2021 and ran into the institution he was trying to scrub. López Obrador’s answer was to blow up the appointment machine rather than repair it.
The honest version is both things at once. The old court was not clean. The new court was not chosen by an informed public. Thirteen percent turnout, record invalid ballots, and party cheat sheets are not a civic awakening. They are a low-energy ratification of a constitutional amendment the legislature already had the votes to pass.
Readers who follow The AEGIS Alliance coverage of politics and captured institutions will recognize the move. Change the selection rules. Keep the patronage. Call the result the people.
What the first year of an elected bench actually tests
The cases that matter are not the swearing-in speeches. They are preventive detention, the militarization of public security, tax fights that touch foreign capital, and any file that pits a Morena statute against a treaty clause. Six votes can lock a doctrine. A disciplinary tribunal can remind a circuit judge what loyalty looks like. “Faceless” benches can hide the name of the person who signed the order.
Aguilar has talked about holding sessions outside the marble headquarters to “bring justice closer to the people.” Traveling the court is a good photograph. It does not answer whether a judge who needed a party list to get elected will rule against that party when the file is ugly. Independence is proven in the loss column, not the biography.
The 2027 election will finish the replacement of the remaining federal docket. CSIS and other Washington shops have already written the investor memo: Mexico is now the only country that elects its entire judiciary by universal suffrage, and the first round was a party sweep. That memo will be on the table when USMCA talks get serious. Sheinbaum can call it sovereignty. Ottawa and Washington will call it risk. Both descriptions can be true at the same time.
Sovereignty talk versus the drug-war pretext
Mexico’s judiciary has been a battlefield for foreign influence since the neoliberal openings of the 1980s and 1990s. Privatization, IMF pressure, and a “war on drugs” that a 2000 Defense Ministry document treated as cover for counter-insurgency all left fingerprints on how cases moved. U.S. lectures about judicial independence arrive with that history attached. They are easier to dismiss when they come from a government that spent decades treating Mexican courts as a venue for protecting cross-border capital.
That does not give Morena a blank check. Electing judges does not automatically drain cartel money from campaigns. It can make the money more efficient. A candidate with a printed list and a local machine does not need to be a legal scholar. He needs to be recognizable on a flyer. Organized crime understands flyers.
The AEGIS Alliance is not going to pretend a 13 percent election is a revolution just because the old court was compromised. We are also not going to pretend U.S. and Canadian objections are only about human rights. They are about who writes the last word on contracts, energy, labor, and security cooperation. Our Costa Rica investor-justice file showed how fast Washington discovers “rule of law” when money is stranded. Mexico is a larger version of the same reflex.
The 2027 test
Half the remaining judges still have to face voters. If turnout stays in the teens and the acordeones stay in circulation, the experiment is over as an experiment. It will simply be how the Mexican federal bench is staffed. If turnout jumps and opposition names survive, Morena will have to live with a court it does not own. That is the only version of this reform that matches the speeches.
Until then, the facts are blunt. The court is seated. The chief justice is Hugo Aguilar Ortiz. The lists won. The trading partners are unhappy. The backlog is historic. The next ballot is 2027. Democracy is not a slogan you print on a cheat sheet. It is whether a judge can say no to the party that put him there and still have a job in the morning.
