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Silvia Delgado is handing out flyers and greeting potential voters in the border town of Juarez, Mexico. She's running to be elected judge in the northern state of Chihuahua. Some of the people know her. She's a grandmother and member of the community. And as a lawyer, she's practiced environmental and criminal law.
But it's the latter that has some people skeptical of whether Delgado should be able to serve as judge at all. And that's because back in 2016, Silvia Delgado was a defense attorney for Joaquin Guzman, better known as El Chapo, co-founder of the Sinaloa drug cartel and one of Mexico's most notorious drug kingpins. Mexico holds its first ever judicial elections on June 1st.
The overhaul of the country's judicial system has seen citizens take to the streets in protest. Critics call the move a threat to the country's rule of law. They question the candidate's qualifications, especially after a year of some of the worst violence in the country's recent history. Now, the government says electing judges will help root out corruption and gives the people of Mexico a say in who should be judge.
On this special episode of Reuters World News, we're exploring what's at stake as Mexico elects its judges. I'm your host, Christopher Waljesper, in Chicago.
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Our reporter, Cassandra Garrison, covers politics from Mexico City and has been following the judicial elections from the beginning. Cassandra, welcome. Thanks for having me. All right, so bring me back up to speed. Around a year ago, people in Mexico were headed to the polls for national elections and they
And now here we are again with another round of voting, this time for the judiciary. Just before President Claudia Scheinbaum took office, the ruling Morena party pushed through a constitutional reform that implied that
electing judges by popular vote for the very first time in Mexico. So we're now seeing over 5,000 candidates vying for these judicial positions. There's over 850 of them, including Supreme Court justices all across the country. So this shift to an elected judiciary came about pretty quickly, right? What was behind that move?
Lopez Obrador's argument was that the judicial system needed an overhaul to root out corruption, to root out elitism, and to make the judicial system more accessible to the average everyday person. It was probably widely understood that Mexico's judicial system had problems and needed some sort of solution. However, overhauling it was a very controversial move that drew a lot of criticism, not just from
opposition parties, but also from allies, including the United States. Now, you've been looking into some of the candidates running for these judge positions, right? Yeah. I wanted to get out and meet some of these people who are going to be competing for judge and magistrate positions. Inviting you to vote for me on June 1st. On June 1st? On June 1st.
I traveled to the city of Juarez to meet Silvia Delgado. She spent one very hot 92-degree afternoon waiting in front of a private school for classes to end and parents to pick up their kids so she could meet them, shake hands, and ask them to vote for her. Thank you. I'm sorry.
And as we were waiting and the band was practicing before classes let out, Delgado told me that she was confident that people in the community knew who she was, knew what kind of person she was, and would support her. She was a single mother of four children. She's a grandmother. And she said she'd worked hard for her career as an attorney and had always followed the law to a letter. I don't care that you're a person. Nothing else.
There are more than 5,000 candidates, but there have been somewhere between 25 and 30 identified by both Congress and a local rights group. And these are people that have something controversial in their past. It may be links to organized crime. Perhaps they were attorneys that somehow advised or worked with a family.
accused drug traffickers or they're people that have some sort of criminality in their own past. And they went through several vetting processes. However, they still ended up on the ballot and now the ballots are as they are going forward in the elections. Some of the candidates that have been identified on this list include, for example, a candidate in the state of Durango who was convicted of a drug crime in the United States and spent several years in prison in Texas.
However, the vetting process just required that candidates have no proof of criminality in Mexico. There doesn't appear to have been a filter asking them for crimes that may have been convicted in other countries.
Another example is an attorney who has admitted to giving legal advice to cartel members that were up for an extradition process to the United States. And there's a former judge who was actually dismissed from his post and faced accusations of corruption, money laundering, and sexual abuse and harassment.
We reached out to many of the candidates on the list who denied a lot of the accusations by the rights groups saying that they had never been convicted of any crime. They flat out denied any involvement in criminal activity. And some of the lawyers who had worked with or represented accused drug traffickers, and they said that they had only worked within the duties of being an attorney and had not done anything illegal.
So it it strikes me that prior to this, judges were appointed and had to be qualified to fill the position. What sort of parameters are in place for these elections? Candidates were evaluated by several committees made up of members of government from different levels. They were required to present proof that they had no criminal background.
But from what we understand, they were not required to, for example, present a list of past clients if they were an attorney. They were, however, required to be of good reputation. What that means and what that really translates to seems to be up for interpretation.
But this is one of the criticisms of the vetting system, that it didn't think about all potential scenarios, perhaps that a candidate was the subject of an investigation, even though they were never charged, or perhaps a candidate was convicted of a crime but later had it reversed on appeal. These types of details do not appear to have been
considered in the vetting process. Therefore, many of these candidates didn't technically violate the requirements. They made it onto the ballot because these types of scenarios weren't contemplated. There has been controversy all along the way of the vetting process. Earlier this year, members of the evaluation committee resigned and the Senate put forth a plan to use a lottery system to choose the candidates that would eventually end up on the ballot.
So this entire process, some critics would say, has been rushed.
And there have not been perhaps sufficient attention paid to the real details and loopholes of vetting these candidates who eventually are going to compete for these positions. So from the beginning, there's been a lot of criticism of this shift, not only in Mexico, but legal experts around the world, right? What's the concern? The criticism of the electoral reform is that
Just the opposite of its plan to root out corruption, it could actually invite it in and usher in the potential for organized crime to get its hands into judicial positions by perhaps installing candidates that might be sympathetic to drug traffickers.
And also it implies the election of thousands and thousands of judge and magistrate candidates by popular vote, which means those that were already in the post then have to compete for those roles. Some of the requirements to be a judge or magistrate in Mexico were also changed through this reform. So less education and less experience now is required to be a judge candidate.
in Mexico, which has also been heavily criticized by opponents of the reform. The United States, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, expressed concern over this reform that it could really lead to a backslide in democracy. And investors as well have been wary of this reform just chipping away at checks and balances in Mexico.
So Mexico's new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, wasn't yet in office when this bill was passed, but she did publicly support it. What's she saying about some of these concerns?
While Scheinbaum has said that these potential problematic candidates will definitely be investigated, the process has continued on without change. Those candidates will end up on the ballot. Some of the more vocal lawmakers, for example, Senate President Gerardo Noronha, he's been
He previously spoke out against this list of candidates saying that anyone with any links to drug traffickers should absolutely not participate in the elections. We had an interview with him and he seemed to change tact a bit, saying that at this stage of the game, the only thing to focus on was
participation in the elections, that it's nothing more than a classist response to question these candidates, and that Mexico's autonomous electoral authority, INE, could deal with any consequences after the election. We also spoke to INE, who told us that there will be a process for investigating any formal complaints against candidates who may be ineligible to take office, and they'll have to do that after the election. And if they determine through proof of
and their own investigation that a candidate should not take office for any sort of reason, then the person in second place for that particular election would take office.
You know, which also implies that somebody who didn't win the popular vote would still get the post. And that's problematic in itself. OK, so Noronha and others say that these critiques are classist. I want to dig into that a little more. How is Sylvia Delgado, who we heard from at the top, responding to some of the criticism about her?
Delgado says that this attack against her and the fact that the rights group Defensoris has highlighted her as a high-risk candidate is nothing short of a political attack. She says she's worked hard for her career, she's done everything by the book, and yes, she did provide legal defense to El Chapo, but she says that was nothing beyond her duties as an attorney. I've fought a lot for what I have, for what I am.
She even got a little bit emotional when talking about it. She said she's always tried to do the right thing and that even people accused of horrendous crimes have the full right to a legal defense. He's a human being, period. So just as a reminder,
El Chapo, the former leader of the Sinaloa cartel, was charged with homicide, money laundering, illegal possession of firearms, drug trafficking, and had also escaped from prison all before being extradited to the United States. And even though he's currently serving a life sentence in the United States, his children, known as Los Chapitos, are considered the new leaders of the Sinaloa cartel.
Now, the decision to transition Mexico's judiciary from an appointed body to an elected one took place against a backdrop of one of the most violent national elections in Mexico's recent history. Candidates were threatened and even killed last summer. How has the atmosphere of violence in Mexico changed?
impacted these elections? Well, we haven't been able to identify specific examples of violence against candidates. When I was in the Electoral Institute for my interview there, they did tell us that some of the protection protocols had been activated, though they didn't disclose
for which candidates. But this would be candidates who felt that they were at risk of some sort of violence or security threat, who expressed a concern to INE, who then relayed it to the government, who will then decide whether or not those candidates are eligible for some sort of government-appointed protection. And while not specifically related to Mexico's judicial elections, being a judge in Mexico can be extremely dangerous and deadly.
As we saw in December, Magistrate Edmundo Román Pinzón was assassinated while leaving a courthouse in Acapulco in broad daylight. At least 22 local judicial professionals have been killed in Mexico since about 2012, according to an organization that tracks those statistics.
So what is Mexico doing to try and protect these candidates and the election process as a whole? That responsibility falls to the government. That protection could include bodyguards and could include an armored car in a more extreme case. The question of whether Mexico even has the resources to protect all the candidates that might be at risk is another issue. Right now, a lot of Mexico's National Guard has been dedicated to the northern border with the United States.
in new agreements in order to better protect that area and to also clamp down on illegal migration. So a lot of critics of this reform argue that there aren't even enough resources, enough law enforcement to go around to protect candidates who might be at risk for deadly violence.
So as you followed Silvia Delgado in Juarez, how were people reacting to her in that moment? And the larger question about her involvement with El Chapo.
Most people were responsive to her, and oftentimes people would stop, shake hands. She also appeared to know a lot of these people. Perhaps their kids went to school together. There were other people in the community that had somehow come across her during her time as an attorney. But she seemed to be well-recognized and well-received.
I spent a little bit of time talking to people as they walked away, asking them their opinions, and they were mixed. One person I spoke to as she was walking away, Sonia Caro, told me that her past as a lawyer for El Chapo didn't bother her, that she considered Delgado to be a good person and an upstanding member of the community. No, para nada. Para nada. En mi casa vamos a votar por ella. Lo hemos platicado.
Another person I spoke to, Sara Lopez, told me that that past of representing him was enough for her to rule her out as a candidate and that even lending a hand to an organized criminal, in her eyes, was corruption.
I was able to speak with Delgado in between her time out in the community campaigning, and she told me that she has no regrets about representing El Chapo. If given the chance, she would do it again. A big thank you to Cassandra and everyone in our Mexico bureau covering next week's judicial elections.
Our audio team includes Jonah Green, Gail Issa, Sharon Reich-Garson, Alex Sommer, David Spencer, Kim Vanell, and of course, myself, Christopher Waljasper. Our senior producers are Tara Oaks and Carmel Crimmins. Lila DeKretzer is our executive producer. Josh Sommer composes all our music and heads up sound design. To never miss an episode, subscribe on your favorite podcast player. And if you like the show, leave a review. We'll be back on Monday with our daily headline show.
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