For months, there was speculation about what the quinazo of Sheinbaum: the political coup that would mark, unambiguously, the true beginning of his presidency through an open and resounding demonstration of power.
I have no doubt that this moment happened last week, when Ernestina Godoy, the president’s closest lawyer, was promoted to the prosecution.
For Sheinbaum, few decisions reach the magnitude of such an approach. A movement which, I dare say, was for the president herself more profound and decisive than the judicial reform itself.
Judicial reform, which many interpreted as the first step toward “absolute presidential control over the judiciary,” ended up becoming a fiasco. With a few exceptions and on very specific issues, the majority of ministers of the new Supreme Court maintain an essentially liberal vision of law, which continues to favor private interests over public goods and which reproduces, to a large extent, the jurisdictional perspective of the previous Court.
The criteria of this new Court are too similar to those of its predecessor to claim, at least for now, that the prophecy of political capture has come true. In fact, beyond some minor administrative adjustments, the vast majority of convictions were resolved by divided voting: a pattern incompatible with any hegemonic control, which would inevitably produce near-unanimous decisions aligned with the ruling coalition.
Therefore, if the judicial power “belongs to Morena”, the only thing that is really clear is that there are many Morenas. The judiciary embodies, in practice, a wide and uneven range of ideologies, many of which are openly contradictory to the party’s more statist and left-leaning positions.
This is because the judicial elections did not take place vertically, but through agreements, negotiations and a distribution of influence in which governors and local operators played a decisive role. Ultimately, it was they who provided the necessary mobilization, leaving a mark as diverse as their own interests. And it is in this diversity that the true nature of Morena’s power lies. A power that is often chaotic and horizontal, rarely calculated vertically.
This is not the case for the prosecutor’s office. Godoy’s appointment was a vertical and deeply personal decision by the president and fell on an institution that, due to its already known opacity and dysfunctions, can operate with much greater discretion.
In fact, virtually all of Morena’s power grabs in recent years have passed, in one way or another, through the hand of the prosecutor.
The necessary qualified majority in the Senate was obtained thanks to the vote of Miguel Ángel Yunes Márquez, a figure surrounded by a long series of accusations and open files. For many observers, this record may have functioned as a subtle hook that facilitated his unexpected shift toward the ruling party.
Versions have also circulated suggesting that, in the case of former minister Alberto Pérez Dayán, his decision not to block judicial reform was influenced by pressures linked to his alleged gambling addiction.
Anyone who knows the power in Mexico knows this. Unambiguous. Each of the turns taken by the country’s main political operators is a screw that turns and adjusts thanks to an infallible duo: a prosecution capable of acting with broad discretion and informal preventive detention.
It is this pair that allows political adversaries to remain in prison for years awaiting sentence, while their cases sink into the endless funnel of public prosecutors.
The judicial power is not the power of the president, nor that of Morena, because there is no unified power within this party. The accusation is.
The blow to the judiciary was a fine juggling of interests. The DA’s office was a little crazy.
Until Godoy, the head of the prosecution functioned de facto as an independent juggler. A figure who approached or distanced himself from opposition or pro-government forces at will, at key moments and on selected issues, to give and give favors. Tortuguismo or passing decisions. Nothing was exempt from being used as a tool.
The era of Ernestina Godoy promises a prosecutor’s office openly coordinated with the federal executive, which will have the merit and the risk of coupling the action of the prosecutor with the objectives of the presidency. There will be no juggling here. This is Sheinbaum’s unequivocal pursuit. And in him his power will be observed.
The signals are already sent.
In less than a week, three former opposition governors, César Duarte of Chihuahua, Javier Duarte of Veracruz and Francisco Javier García Cabeza de Vaca, received terrible news. The first was arrested. The second will face money laundering charges that he had managed to avoid until now. And the third, for organized crime.
Another important message is for large billers. At least those associated with the opposition. One of the new prosecutor’s first decisions was to facilitate the extradition of Víctor Manuel Álvarez Puga, whom she considers the great architect of a network of shell companies that drained millions of resources from the Treasury by issuing false invoices.
Who would have thought that the real support of the opposition was not the judiciary, but the prosecutor’s office.
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