The Senate of the Republic approved the appointment of Ernestina Godoy as Prosecutor General of the Republic, with a majority of 97 votes in favor of the groups Morena, the Workers’ Party, PVEM and Movimento Ciudadano, an opposition party that decided to give its six votes to the Prosecutor General in exchange for signing the Ten Commandments of Commitments to improve the administration of the FGR.
In addition to the 97 votes in favour, 19 against and 11 invalid votes were cast, including senators such as PRI member Alejandro Moreno and PAN member Lili Tellez, who wrote slogans on the ballot paper rejecting the process. “No to the mafia,” wrote Tellez, who took advantage of the appearance of the three candidates to ask Godoy whether he would go after Moreno politicians accused of serious corruption cases.
The new Attorney General protested to the Senate this afternoon, and during her intervention in the previous appearance before senators, she offered that there would be no political persecution, but she warned that there would be no impunity either. He added: “No one will be accused unjustly, because in the administration of justice there is no room for partial measures or those with political overtones. The administration of justice that I propose is an administration loyal to the principles and values of the country, without the possibility of negotiation as well, as justice is not negotiated.” He concluded his speech with a phrase that former President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador used to repeat: “Nothing is outside the law, no one is above the law.”
Shortlist of women
In the morning, under the pretext of “it’s time for women,” President Claudia Sheinbaum sent to the Senate an exclusively shortlisted list of candidates for the appointment of the new Prosecutor General; This process was solved in record time and the dice were loaded in favor of Ernestina Godoy.
In addition to Godoy, the current head of the FGR office, Sheinbaum included two former candidates from recent judicial elections to the shortlist: Luz María Zarza, who ran for secretary of the nation’s Supreme Court of Justice, and Maribel Bojorges Beltran, who sought to become a judge in Mexico City.
The three candidates appeared on Wednesday in the plenary session of the Senate of the Republic, with three rounds of questions from the six parliamentary groups. The appointment was processed in less than a week, with Morena and his allies using their legislative majority to speed up the legislative procedure and reduce it to a mere procedure.
The shortlist excluded two women and five men, including Luis Manuel Pérez de Acha, a lawyer, activist and former citizen commissioner of the National Anti-Corruption System, who was the only one of the 43 candidates on the original list to publicly state his aspirations with a proposal to strengthen the technical and institutional capacities of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Ernestina Godoy has been holding the position since last Friday, after the forced resignation of Alejandro Gertz, who before his departure signed an agreement transforming the Morinista official into a special prosecutor to monitor competition, exactly the position provided by law to replace the owner in the event of permanent absence.
The opposition has denounced the explicit process of removing Gertz and placing in the FGR Godoy – a Morena activist who in 2024 was elected senator and who until a week ago was a presidential legal advisor – as a political maneuver that would end the constitutional independence of the prosecutor’s office and seek to cover up Morena politicians allegedly involved in various corruption cases.
Claudia Anaya, a senator from the Constitutional Revolutionary Party, warned on Tuesday, at the session in which the list of ten candidates from which the shortlist emerged was approved. “Tomorrow we will vote for our colleague Senator Ernestina Godoy, a former legal advisor who is very close to the president, and they still come here to pretend that they are moving towards the independent prosecutor’s office, and they go with instructions to close all existing files related to the theft of the century, the financial Huachicole. It is clear that they are not ashamed, that they are violating constitutional controls, and that the only thing they are doing is harming the Republic with every step they take,” Anaya said.
The National Action Party spoke in the same tone, through Senator Raymundo Bolaños, who accused that the FGR law was being used as a reward for political loyalty. The National Action Party member said, “We are facing a simulation process where there is already a definite winner. If the appointment process favors rapprochement with the government, we are doomed to be a country of quotas and friends.”
The Senate processed the appointment according to the agreement it approved on Tuesday, in an attendance format that was completed in less than three hours. With three rounds of questions of two minutes each for each of the six parliamentary groups. Once the question round is over, candidates can speak for up to 20 minutes in alphabetical order (Bokhorges, Godoy, Zarza) to answer questions and present their work project. Although only Godoy used his full time.
At the conclusion of these participations, the parliamentary blocs took a position regarding the participation of shortlist members.
The Morena, PT and PT benches have predicted since the morning that they will vote for Ernestina Godoy, while the Citizens’ Movement benches have announced the Ten Commandments of Public Obligations that, in their opinion, must be borne by whoever will occupy the Attorney General’s Office in the coming years, so the six senators will vote for whoever decides to sign them.
“If this entire document is signed, we will evaluate the meaning of our vote. I say it in all my messages: There is no doubt that Ernestina Godoy will be the next prosecutor. It is a decision taken by the president and the majority,” Communist Party coordinator Clemente Castañeda said this morning.
Godoy took the aforementioned Decalogue and signed it, and the six senators from the Citizens’ Movement voted for him, along with the official parties.