User:Sorenlaw/Legal system of Mexico

Origins of Mexico's Justice System Originally the Mexican justice system inherited the Spanish Monarch’s right of review and other sovereign prerogatives in official matters of justice. Mexico was too far away from the mother country to realistically follow such prerogatives so the Viceroy, or “person in the place of” the Sovereign, kept the appearances of following the mother countries direction while really setting up it’s own. Many of these inheritances, suggest author Jorge G. Castaneda, contribute to what many see as an unfair, arbitrary and antiquated justice system.

Throughout Manana Forever, Castañeda's book about Mexico and the Mexican character, he references what he calls the destructive tendency of the “Mexican predilection for simulation.”

"Simulation—or the tendency to present something as it is not, whether on an individual or a national level—is a Mexican peculiarity long dissected by writers and observers. In Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz celebrated it as the art of Form, a Spanish and Indian heritage, while noting the toll it takes on those who avail themselves of it; Castañeda condemns it as “a substitute for facing up to awkward realities,” and sees its noxious effects everywhere. Most fundamentally, he identifies it as the rot besetting the Mexican legal system. In colonial times, laws written in Spain often had little relevance in Mexico, and so a system was worked out whereby laws were officially “obeyed” but not applied. As Castañeda explains, “This was the beginning of the separation between law and fact, between a de jure world and a de facto one, between the outward, rhetorical, and even reverential respect for the law in the abstract, and the emergence of a path in everyday life totally decoupled from that law.”

This dissociation between rhetoric and reality was later reinforced by a series of Mexican constitutions, the first composed after the War of Independence and adopted in 1824, and the last proclaimed after the Mexican Revolution, in 1917. Like nearly all the constitutions of Latin American nations, these documents were based on the US Constitution and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and were what Castañeda calls “aspirational” texts, based on the assumption that Mexico already had elections, separation of powers, economic freedoms and civil liberties. Yet in the absence of this framework for democracy, work-around solutions were devised from the beginning, and it was taken for granted that the letter of the law would remain precisely that. Even in the international arena, Mexico acquired the habit of ratifying treaties but never passing the legislation necessary to implement them at home." The Nation, Double Vantage: On Jorge Castañeda