Under the pretext of “it’s time for women”, President Claudia Sheinbaum on Wednesday sent to the Senate of the Republic an exclusively shortlist of candidates to appoint a new Prosecutor General of the Republic; The process that will be released today, with all the dice 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 on 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 will appear on Wednesday in the plenary session of the Senate, with lawmakers likely to ask them questions; The vote will then be held by ballot (votes cast will be secret), and the winner will protest this afternoon. The appointment process is scheduled to take place in a record time of no more than a week, as Morena and his allies used their legislative majority to speed up the legislative procedure and turn it into 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.
In the Senate, the vote is supposed to be in favor of Ernestina Godoy, who has been in office since last Friday, after the forced resignation of Alejandro Gertz, who before his departure signed an agreement to transform the Morenista official into a special prosecutor to monitor the competition, exactly the position designated by law to replace the incumbent in the event of his permanent absence.
The open operation to remove Gertz and place in the FGR Godoy – a Morena activist who was elected Senator of the Republic and who until a week ago was a presidential legal adviser – has been denounced by the opposition as a political maneuver that will 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.”
Such will be the appearances
The Senate on Tuesday approved the appearance format of the three FGR candidates. It stipulates that three rounds of question formulation will be opened, where the six parliamentary groups will have only two minutes to ask a question. Once the question round is over, candidates will speak for up to 20 minutes in alphabetical order (Bokhorges, Godoy, Zarza) to answer questions and present their work project.
At the end of these engagements, the parliamentary groups will speak, for up to five minutes each, to express their position on the shortlisted members’ entries.
After the locations are determined, the candidates will leave the plenary hall and voting will take place immediately by ballot. The winner will be sworn in before the Senate itself on the same day.
The seats of Morena, the PVEM and the Workers’ Party have already predicted that they will vote for Ernestina Godoy, while the seats of the Citizens’ Movement have announced a set of public obligations that, in their opinion, should be borne by whoever will occupy the Attorney General’s Office in the coming years, so the six senators will vote in favor of the person who decides to sign it.
“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.