Justice is dressed in anticipation (and a touch of drama)
It seems that the Mexican federal justice system has decided to anticipate the facts with a foresight that would make Nostradamus pale. A federal judge, in a burst of almost telepathic judicial zeal, has granted a three-day period to the children of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador to decide whether or not to accept a legal gift that they had not even expressly requested: a protection against possible arrest warrants, incommunicado detention and, oh yes, why not, against a hypothetical and imminent deprivation of liberty life. Because in Mexico, preventive justice now also includes clauses against murder, apparently.
The head of the Second District Court in Zacatecas, María Citlallic Vizcaya Zamudio, notified this Wednesday that a certain Francisco Javier Rodríguez Smith Macdonald, in an act of legal altruism that borders on the psychic, promoted a demand for guarantees in favor of the presidential offspring and a cast of characters that sounds more like the cast of a narco soap opera than a list of judicial beneficiaries. Among the winners is none other than Rear Admiral Fernando Farías Laguna, involved in the juicy fiscal huachicol network of the Navy and currently enjoying the status of fugitive from justice. Because, of course, who better to need preventive protection than someone who is already being sought?
A suspension with a flavor of absurdity
Consequently, and demonstrating that logic sometimes takes a permanent vacation in the courts, the judge granted a outright suspension. This means, in Christian terms, that the children of López Obrador and company will not be able to be detained and any bad treatment or incommunication of which, as far as the general public knows, they were not being subjected, will be immediately put to an end. It’s like receiving a court order protecting you from an alien abduction: admirably cautious, but somewhat disconnected from immediate reality.
But here’s the icing on the cake: the judge required the complainants to state, within the aforementioned period of 72 hours, whether or not they ratify the claim for amparo filed… in their favor! A situation as peculiar as if they gave you an umbrella on a sunny day and then asked you for written confirmation that, indeed, you do not want it to rain on you.
Just in case, the suspension also decreed that, in the unlikely event that the former president’s children were captured out of procedure and without a written order or warrant (because apparently illegal detentions are so common that they deserve their own generic protection), they must be released immediately. It’s comforting to know that the judicial system has protocols for such specific and, ahem, unconventional scenarios.
The complete list of the judicial function
The claim for protection, promoted by this mysterious legal benefactor, includes a list of characters that one would expect to find in a spin-off of “The Lord of the Skies.” Along with the López Beltráns and the fugitive rear admiral, there is Roberto Cantú, alias “The Lord of the Ships” (because colorful nicknames are mandatory), and a troupe of individuals who demand protection against an arrest order, a possible and imminent deprivation of life (a term as vague as it is terrifying) or an eventual forced disappearance. All of this, they allege, is attributed to the Zacatecas Attorney General’s Office, which suddenly sounds more like a villain from an action movie than an institution of the rule of law.
And in case a preventive protection was not enough, the lists of agreements reveal that Verónica Beltrán Munguía, head of the Ninth District Court, reported another protection in the name of Andrés Manuel López Beltrán. This document, with file number 1728/2025, claims protection against detention, incommunication, untraceability, deprivation of life, forced disappearance or arrest order by the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime. Basically, it’s a shopping list of all the horrors the judicial system can inflict, and the judge, instead of asking for proof that any of this is even remotely likely, flatly orders a suspension of these acts. Because in contemporary Mexico, justice seems to operate based on an extreme precautionary principle: first it is suspended, then… well, then maybe it is investigated if there was something to suspend.
The magistrate ordered to warn the responsible authorities so that they “immediately cease the forced disappearance, incommunication and possible torture that the complainants are said to be subjected to.” Note the elegant “it is said,” which introduces a level of speculation so delightfully vague that it could apply to any fictional scenario. Is it said by whom? Based on what? Does the judge have a crystal ball that is especially sensitive to potential courtroom dramas? Article 22 of the Constitution prohibits torture and unusual penalties, which is magnificent, but from there to issuing suspensions against acts that have not occurred—and that may never occur—there is an abyss of legal absurdity.
All this judicial circus leaves a question floating in the air, as heavy as the irony that surrounds it: are we witnessing a legal innovation to protect human rights in an ultra-preventive way, or rather a spectacle of powers of authority used to create a legal shield for politically exposed figures and their peculiar companies? The line between legitimate caution and judicial absurdity has never been so fine, and so publicly ridiculed.
While the former president’s children decide in the next three days whether to accept this legal umbrella against a storm that may never arrive, the rest of us are left contemplating how Mexican justice sometimes seems more interested in acting on dramatic assumptions than on concrete facts. A true exercise of jurisdictional imagination.
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