Low turnout in Mexican judicial elections

June 2, 2025

Mexico held its first judicial elections yesterday. Turnout was extremely low — 13% and voters complained that the multiple ballots and candidates were confusing. The low turnout (participation in last year’s presidential election was 60%) could further undermine the controversial judicial reform that made all of the country’s judges subject to popular elections. (See Friday’s post.)

Votes are still being counted for posts that include all nine Supreme Court justices.

President Claudia Sheinbaum defended the election as a success for democracy, saying that accusations that the ruling Morena party sought to control the judiciary were misguided: “If the objective was to control the courts, why would we hold an election?” she said.

(Animal Político, Reuters, Associated Press)

Expert takes:

• The low vote count makes the election a bitter win for Morena, according to The Mexico Political Economist: “The government will celebrate, yet its electoral machine seems to have failed. Its preferred candidates will dominate the courts, but internally there are worries that they won chiefly because the opposition stayed home. There are rumours of a cabinet reshuffle in the Sheinbaum administration.”

• The issue is less extreme than many analysts are portraying, argues Ioan Grillo in CrashOut: “Judicial elections don't solve a dysfunctional justice system but it's overblown to say Mexican democracy is kaput.”

More Mexico

• Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s success with Trump - thus far - has not been just because he “always chickens out,” but because, “instead of relying solely on waiting for him to back down, she negotiated with him to allow him to save face and get victories from his negotiations while other countries retaliated more swiftly,” argues James Bosworth in the Latin America Risk Report.

• The U.S. government’s average monthly seizures of fentanyl at the Mexican border have dropped by more than half — a decline that started before Trump took office in January, undermining his administration’s claim of credit. Among the several potential factors: the Sinaloa Cartel War, reports the Washington Post.

Regional Relations

• James Bosworth analyzes why the U.S. might be angling to sanction Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes — among the reasons: “The Trump administration wants to fight against China’s influence in the region and hitting Brazil prior to the big BRICS meeting in July is one way to do it. … there will likely be additional tensions and threats of sanctions prior to the BRICS summit in Brazil in July.”

Brazil

• Guardian journalist Jonathan Watts details the brutal political bullying environment minister Marina Silva faced in Brazil’s senate last week: “Her thuggish tormentors – all white male politicians on the infrastructure committee – took turns to publicly belittle the 67-year-old black woman, who has done more than anyone to protect the natural wealth of the country – the Amazon rainforest, Pantanal wetlands, Cerrado savannah and other biomes – from rapacious abuse.”

• The reason these politicians felt empowered to do so, in addition to ideology, racism and misogyny, is likely “because over the previous few days, Lula had taken the side of the oil industry rather than the Amazon rainforest, and then – not by coincidence – the Brazilian environmental movement suffered one of the biggest legislative defeats in its history,” argues Watts. (Guardian)

• Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s conviction that he can pull off a political comeback — despite being legally barred from running for office and accused of planning a coup — has effectively blocked his right-wing movement from consolidating a successor, and might prove an electoral boon to the otherwise struggling Lula administration, according to Bloomberg.

• Bolsonaro’s coup trial is in its second week before the Supreme Court: his former infrastructure minister Tarcisio de Freitas told the court he was not aware of a plot to thwart Lula from taking power. "During the period I was with the president during the final stretch (of the government), in several conversations, he never touched on that subject, never mentioned any attempt at constitutional disruption," said Freitas, who is now governor of the state of São Paulo, and a likely successor to Bolsonaro. (AFP)

• “The arrest of a well-known Brazilian funk singer on charges of allegedly inciting crime in his lyrics and an alleged connection to a major criminal gang has sparked outrage among artists, intellectuals and legal experts,” reports the Guardian.

Chile

• Chilean President Gabriel Boric pledged to diversify his nation’s defense ties to depend less on Israel, issuing a scathing rebuke over violence in Gaza during his annual State of the Nation address, yesterday. (Bloomberg)

El Salvador

• El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele lashed out at critics in his annual address to Congress yesterday, marking his sixth year in power: “To the international media, you know what? I don’t care if you call me a dictator. Better that than seeing Salvadorans killed on the streets. When I pick up the phone I see that they say: ‘Dictator, dictator, dictator’. I prefer that to reading: ‘Murder, murder, murder’.” (El País)

Haiti

• Most of Port-au-Prince is under gang control. The interim presidential council, wracked by infighting, is holed up in an affluent neighborhood where “a band of self-defence groups, led by a police officer known as Samuel, are the only people standing between the council and total collapse,” reports the Financial Times.

Migration

• The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday announced it would allow the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants living in the United States. (Guardian)

• Officials said Friday’s decision on immigration parole could affect about 530,000 migrants, though many of them may have obtained another legal status in the United States, reports the Washington Post.

• “Roughly seven in ten migrants who failed to cross into the U.S. after President Donald Trump was sworn in on January 20 are now choosing to remain in Mexico rather than return to their countries of origin, according to IOM,” reports the Latin Times. (Via Americas Migration Brief.)

• “The Trump Administration is using an “Alien Enemy Validation Guide” to target supposed members of Tren de Aragua, but many of the items on the list—tattoos, sports jerseys, Jordans—are commonplace in urban style and music,” writes Oriana van Praag in a New Yorker piece on the criminalization of Venezuelan street culture.

• U.S. courts are dismissing the cases of Venezuelan migrants deported by the U.S. to El Salvador - a development advocates claim is a way to complete their "disappearance" from the U.S. legal system and further complicate their release from jail, reports the Latin Times.

Panama

• Workers in Panama at a subsidiary of the U.S.-based banana company Chiquita Brands rejected President José Raúl Mulino’s demand to reopen roads they have blocked in protest of a recent pension reform, reports AFP.