By Bruno Anaya Ortiz
Last week, Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress, began discussing a constitutional reform project targeting a massive modification of the country’s electoral institutions and processes. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) submitted the reform bill to the Chamber of Deputies in April. Since Morena, the President’s party, holds an absolute majority in both chambers of Congress and controls 22 out of 32 state congresses, the constitutional reform has good odds of being approved. Morena only needs to bring a handful of opposition-party representatives to its cause in order to attain the two-thirds super-majority necessary to pass the bill onto the Senate, where it also holds a majority.
One underappreciated effect of the reform is that it would walk back many of the avenues of Indigenous representation that have slowly developed under Mexico’s current electoral institutions. This aspect of the reform bill has not received much media attention. However, the reform threatens to undermine the results of several decades of Indigenous legal activism and the human rights-oriented precedents of the Electoral Tribunal.
The reform bill proposes concentrating electoral powers in the federal government. This shift will undermine existing state-level electoral systems designed to protect Indigenous rights. Under the current system, state congresses adopt their own electoral procedure laws, and each state has an autonomous electoral institute. The President’s bill proposes concentrating the attributes of local electoral institutes in a new autonomous federal agency, the Instituto Nacional de Elecciones y Consultas (INEC, National Institute for Elections and Consultations), which would replace the existing Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE, National Electoral Institute). The reform bill also proposes having “unified electoral legislation” across the country, meaning state congresses would no longer be able to adopt laws unique to their state on electoral matters.
The most significant electoral protections for Mexico’s Indigenous communities developed over the last three decades have occurred at the state level. Most notably, the state of Oaxaca pioneered a system of autonomous Indigenous elections starting in the late 1990s. In Oaxaca, municipalities with majority-Indigenous populations may organize elections through procedures determined by the communities themselves. These procedures often require that candidates first participate in a system of community service known as tequio. Indigenous elections also tend to deliberate and vote through community assemblies in which residents voice their preferred opinions and ultimately support their candidate. Oaxaca’s Electoral Institute has played an instrumental role in facilitating this policy. Today, 418 of Oaxaca’s 570 municipalities elect local authorities through Indigenous normative systems.
Over the last few years, other states have emulated Oaxaca’s system of Indigenous elections, and federal elections have developed new modes of Indigenous electoral representation inspired by Oaxaca’s innovation. The states of Guerrero and Hidalgo have modified their laws of electoral procedure to allow majority-Indigenous municipalities to elect their local governments autonomously. Eight states have local electoral laws including provisions obligating political parties to nominate at least one Indigenous candidate for local elections in municipalities with an Indigenous population above a certain threshold (usually 40% but in some states as low as 25%). Since 2017, the National Electoral Institute has required political parties to nominate a certain number of Indigenous candidates for federal elections to the Chamber of Deputies. While a unified electoral law might replicate some portions of Oaxaca’s electoral provisions, the new system shuts out the local innovation and legal activism that first made Oaxaca the site of institutional innovation.
The President’s proposed system of electoral institutions also cannot preserve several elements of Oaxaca’s Indigenous election system. Making Indigenous elections a reality in Oaxaca has been accomplished through the labor of the state’s Electoral Institute, which has worked with communities over the years to mediate internal conflicts and develop electoral procedures acceptable both to the communities’ customs and to the state’s law. The elimination of state electoral institutes, coupled with a series of budgetary cuts, make it unlikely that the National Institute for Elections and Consultations could replicate the Oaxaca Electoral Institute’s long-fostered fieldwork, which relies on relationships cultivated over long periods with the communities themselves.
One crucial part of the President’s constitutional reform bill is the reduction of legislators across all levels of government: federal, state, and municipal. This modification is sure to undermine existing avenues for Indigenous representation. For municipalities with less than 60 thousand inhabitants, the bill limits municipal councils to only three members. In such municipalities, municipal councils would be comprised of a municipal president, a syndic, and a single regidor or municipal councilmember. In Oaxaca, where the average population per municipality is around 7,000, the availability of several regidor spots on the municipal council has been instrumental in negotiating consensus-based compositions for local governments. One of the most common sources of post-electoral conflict in Indigenous municipalities stems from different communities that inhabit the same municipality. In these cases, each community seeks to elect local government members through its own community assembly. Oaxaca’s Electoral Institute has found peaceful resolutions to this sort of conflict by having each community within the municipality nominate one regidor, thereby forming municipal councils with as many regidores as there are individual communities, often on the order of six. Under the proposed reform, this solution would be constitutionally forbidden.
The preamble of the President’s reform bill states that its new configuration of the electoral system seeks to “expand representation and guarantee plurality.” On the question of representation for Mexico’s Indigenous peoples, the reform looks poised to make Mexican democracy a little bit less plural than it is now.
Bruno Anaya Ortiz is a doctoral candidate in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkley. He holds an M.A. in Political Philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and a B.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. Bruno’s dissertation studies how Mexican law’s narrative of the nation has shifted from a model of a single “mestiza” nation to one of a “pluricultural nation” in the last three decades. The rise of the “pluricultural nation” discourse coincides with Mexico’s turn to democracy starting in the mid-1990s and is deeply imbricated in the democratic period’s new electoral institutions. As such, his work studies how cultural recognition and autonomy have come to be a part of Mexico’s new democratic project.
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