Politics: Recently approved bills raise the specter of weakened civil liberties

MEXICO - Report 07 Jul 2025 by Guillermo Valdés and Francisco González

The priority of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration has been to consolidate her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s "Plan C", of obtaining and using an automatic two-thirds majority in congress to be able to pass legislation as well as amend the constitution in order to permanently enshrine the Fourth Transformation’s main policies. In that regard, a special legislative period was called for June 23 to July 2 to consider 16 bills that were not able to be passed in the previous period that ended on April 30.

Despite the ruling party’s commanding majority in both houses of Congress, the legislative results of the session ending on April 30 were meager due to a lack of consensus and infighting between various Morena internal groups. But even in the special June-July period of sessions, many of the bills did not have the corresponding committee resolutions with recommendations on the final content of the proposed legislation. This was compounded by the unprecedented situation of lawmakers themselves not having copies of the committee resolutions on at least three major pieces of legislation: the economic competition law regulating monopoly practices, the bill on missing and disappeared persons, and the railway system law.

There were steps backwards in the laws passed, particularly on questions such as government surveillance and phone taps without court orders, solely based on public prosecutor’s office requests. The Law to Eliminate Bureaucratic Paperwork Procedures established a national ID card with biometric data with a corresponding “Llave MX” code that will allow the government to access all types of individuals’ personal data without restrictions. Other controversies that in the end resulted in a democratic regression were the complete and permanent militarization of the National Guard, which will be the main State police/military force, now attached to the Ministry of National Defense. The opposition has charged that under the pretext of strengthening the fight against organized crime, a police state is being created, and in the name of public security civil liberties are being seriously threatened.

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