The Judicial Reform as Constitutional Turning Point
When Claudia Sheinbaum took office on October 1, 2024, she inherited a political machine unlike any her predecessors commanded. MORENA and its allied parties held legislative supermajorities in both chambers of Congress. What this meant in practical terms became clear within months: the ability to pass constitutional amendments without a single opposition vote. The judicial reform completed in early 2025 is the most significant institutional restructuring in Mexico since the 1917 Constitution itself, and understanding its mechanics helps explain why the Sheinbaum administration faces criticism even from allies worried about democratic backsliding.
The reform mandated that federal judges, including those on the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, face popular election rather than appointment through merit-based procedures. This sounds straightforward until you look at the actual numbers. Sixty-five percent of sitting Supreme Court justices either resigned or declined to participate in the retention election. That is not a minor attrition rate. That is a near-collapse of institutional continuity. The justices departed because they understood what was being asked of them: submit their judicial philosophies and past rulings to electoral judgment, which fundamentally changes the relationship between judicial independence and democratic accountability.
The U.S. State Department formally criticized the reform as undermining the rule of law. This criticism carries weight not because Washington dictates Mexican policy, but because it signals how international observers are reading the institutional changes. The Sheinbaum administration faced a genuine dilemma. The judicial system inherited from previous administrations had real problems: corruption, delays, inconsistent jurisprudence. Yet the solution MORENA’s Congress adopted chose velocity over careful institutional design. That choice reflects both the confidence of a governing coalition and the risks that come with supermajority politics.
Cartel Violence, Terrorism Designations, and the Sovereignty Question
In February 2025, the Trump administration moved to designate six Mexican cartels, including the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Read past the headline and you encounter genuine complexity. Foreign Terrorist Organization designations carry real legal consequences. They restrict financial transactions. They set thresholds for U.S. military engagement and support. They reframe the relationship between two countries that had been negotiating organized crime as a bilateral security problem into something more like a Mexican internal security failure requiring outside intervention.
Sheinbaum inherited a government committed to a security doctrine called “hugs not bullets” (abrazos no balazos), which prioritizes social programs and reduced militarization over direct confrontation with trafficking organizations. The Trump administration’s FTO designations hit this approach head-on. They suggested Mexico’s cartels had evolved beyond criminal enterprises into something requiring counter-terrorism frameworks. The diplomatic conversation that followed revealed why the cartel designation question cuts so deep: it goes directly to Mexican sovereignty and how the country gets to define its own security challenges.
Consider the practical effect on fentanyl flows. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 27,000 pounds of fentanyl seized at the U.S.-Mexico border during fiscal year 2025. That figure demands context. At the same time, CDC preliminary estimates showed U.S. overdose deaths declining for the second consecutive year. This creates an apparent paradox. Are seizures preventing overdoses? Are other factors driving the decline? Has fentanyl production simply increased so dramatically that 27,000 pounds represents a smaller share of total flows than it once did? The Sheinbaum administration must navigate a situation where the metrics of success remain genuinely ambiguous.
Political Violence and the Institutional Vacuum
This is where the institutional changes and cartel dynamics intersect in ways that should concern anyone watching Mexican democracy. Between January and October 2025, the Wilson Center Mexico Institute Political Violence Tracker documented forty-seven sitting or recently elected local officials assassinated across Mexico. That is the highest rate recorded in the Institute’s tracking period. These are not abstract statistics. These are mayors, local council members, and municipal officials killed in their communities during what should be a stabilization period under a new administration.
The violence targeting local officials reflects a specific dynamic. Federal forces remain concentrated on major cities and trafficking corridors. Local governments lack resources for their own security. Cartels hold practical control over territory in ways that elected officials cannot easily challenge. When an official takes office threatening to enforce tax collection or limit cartel operations, they become targets. The judicial reform makes this problem harder, not easier. New judges with electoral rather than professional credentials, selected through a system designed to reflect popular will rather than institutional continuity, inherit courtrooms where they must try cases against organizations that have already shown they will kill government officials.
Sheinbaum faces a genuine strategic problem. The MORENA supermajority enables institutional change at the federal level. But that federal power gets harder to translate into state and local control precisely when cartel violence makes local governance dangerous. The administration can pass constitutional amendments. It cannot simply close the gap between what federal law permits and what local officials can enforce without risking their lives.
MORENA’s Consolidation and Its Discontents
The supermajority enables speed but also creates brittleness. MORENA’s dominance in Congress means opposition parties function largely as commentators on policy rather than meaningful legislative counterweights. This appeals to governing coalitions because it permits rapid implementation of priorities. It troubles democrats because concentrated power tends to accumulate errors without adequate correction. The judicial reform illustrates this exactly. Rapid passage. Limited meaningful opposition. Constitutional change with unprecedented institutional disruption.
What happens when MORENA no longer holds supermajorities? Mexican electoral cycles eventually produce power transitions. The new judicial system will persist. The judges selected through popular election will serve their terms. The institutional architecture created during this period of consolidated power will outlast the political conditions that produced it. This matters because institutions designed for supermajority governance function differently during periods of divided power. The real question for Sheinbaum’s administration is whether the institutional changes completed in 2025 strengthen Mexican democracy or create fragilities that later administrations will have to manage.
What Remains Uncertain
Sheinbaum’s first year presented three fundamentally difficult choices without clean solutions. How should Mexico reform a genuinely troubled judicial system? How should it handle terrorism designations and cartel violence while maintaining sovereignty over its security strategy? How should it govern localities where elected officials face assassination? The MORENA supermajority provided the power to make decisions quickly. It did not make those decisions painless.
The mechanisms through which Sheinbaum’s government is operating deserve serious scrutiny because they reflect real tensions in democratic governance. Institutional change requires power. Power concentrated without restraint tends toward error. Yet paralysis through permanent opposition also undermines governance. These are not rhetorical tensions. They shape actual outcomes for actual people across Mexico. What are you watching most carefully as this administration moves forward? The cartel violence trajectories? The new judiciary’s actual performance? The political violence numbers? I’d welcome your thoughts on which indicators matter most for understanding whether these institutional changes ultimately strengthen or weaken Mexican democracy.