| | |  Editorials | Issues | September 2009 
Official Immunity and Mexico's Fight Against Corruption
 Sylvia Longmire - mexidata.info
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September 30, 2009
 |  | If an elected official does commit a crime, there is a process in place by which the Mexican Congress can have this immunity removed, and it’s called desafuero. |  | | |
All Mexican elected officials, including the president, legislators, governors and mayors, enjoy the privilege of immunity from having criminal charges brought against them while in office. This is called fuero ("procedural immunity" in this case), although the term is also used for freedom of speech protections granted to members of Congress. However, if an elected official does commit a crime, there is a process in place by which the Mexican Congress can have this immunity removed, and it’s called desafuero. This process is usually quite slow, and can sometimes take years to resolve.
Perhaps this is why it’s been so rare - until now.
In 2004, Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies voted to strip immunity from Rene Bejarano, than a federal deputy and the former floor leader of the Partido de la Revolución Democratica (PRD) in the Mexico City Legislative Assembly. Bejarano was caught on videotape accepting bribes from a businessman, charged with corruption, and effectively removed from office.
In April 2005, Congress stripped immunity from former presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. This cleared the way for his arrest on charges that he ignored a court order to stop construction of a road on contested private land, and many thought at the time it would prevent him from running for office in 2006.
However, López Obrador was very popular in Mexico at the time, and then-President Vicente Fox felt that bringing him up on charges would go against the will of millions of people. So, Fox appeared on national television later that month and said the matter would no longer be pursued. López Obrador remained mayor of Mexico City, and he (unsuccessfully) ran for president in the most contested political race in Mexico’s history.
Some elected officials choose not to stick around and wait for desafuero. In the late 1990s, then-Governor of Quintana Roo, Mario Villanueva, was accused of being involved in drug trafficking. Instead of facing arrest when his immunity expired at the end of his term, Villanueva fled two weeks before handing over his office. He was a fugitive for two years, and was eventually arrested and jailed for money-laundering offenses.
Now we have the present-day, and the interesting case of Julio César Godoy Toscano.
Godoy Toscano, the half-brother of Michoacán Governor Leonel Godoy (PRD), was linked to La Familia Michoacana by a recent federal Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (SSP) investigation. At the time, Godoy Toscano was running as a member of the PRD for one of the 12 directly elected seats in the federal Chamber of Deputies. He easily won the election in the First District, where the PRD is quite popular.
After the charges were made public, Godoy Toscano fled and went into hiding. The Procuraduría General de la República (PGR) tried to keep him from taking office by filing motions to withhold ratification of the election. The electoral court denied the request, declaring that the issue was not within its purview, and that there was insufficient evidence to prove Godoy Toscano was involved with La Familia. The PGR then appealed to the Chamber of Deputies, who agreed to look into the matter but was noncommittal about any future action it might take.
On Aug. 29, the incoming 61st Legislature's Chamber of Deputies met without Godoy Toscano, as the PGR requested he be denied access to the Plenary Hall. As well, a warrant has been issued for his arrest, and it appears increasingly unlikely he will ever take office, even though the election results have been ratified. In early September, he attempted to file an official protest over his inability to be sworn in, but his request was deemed illegal.
If the investigation results would have been released after Godoy Toscano had taken office, he would have fallen under the rules of fuero. Timing is everything in politics.
And the timing of President Felipe Calderón and his campaign to eliminate - or at least significantly reduce - corruption couldn’t be worse for the ten mayors and seventeen other elected officials who were arrested in Michoacán back in May. Seven of those mayors were charged with crimes in June, meaning the desafuero process must have occurred, and quickly, although media reports at the time didn’t mention whether or not they claimed immunity.
So the question becomes, will the Mexican Congress support Calderón’s fight against corruption by stripping officials’ immunity more quickly and easily?
Arrests of mayors and allegations of legislators’ involvement with drug cartels have become frequent enough that one has to ask if eliminating immunity through a constitutional referendum might not be more efficient.
Regardless of whether the immunity of elected officials continues or not, it’s important for the Calderón administration and the Mexican Congress to demonstrate to the Mexican people that no one - including mayors and legislators - is above the law.
Sylvia Longmire is a former Air Force officer and Special Agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, where she specialized in counterintelligence, counterespionage, and force protection analysis. After being medically retired in 2005, Ms. Longmire worked for almost four years as a Senior Intelligence Analyst for the California State Terrorism Threat Assessment Center, providing daily situational awareness to senior state government officials on southwest border violence and significant events in Latin America. She received her Master’s degree from the University of South Florida in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, with a focus on the Cuban and Guatemalan revolutions. Ms. Longmire is currently an independent consultant and freelance writer. Her website is Mexico's Drug War; she is a regular contributor to Examiner.com; and her email address is spooky926(at)gmail.com. |
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