Workers at Mexico’s federal courts launch a 4-day strike over president’s planned budget cuts

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Hundreds of judicial employees, from administrative staff to judges, took to the steps of Mexico City’s largest federal court Thursday to launch a national, four-day strike against proposed budget cuts.

In the first labor action to emerge in Mexico’s judiciary in decades, workers are protesting planned reductions in funding for the judiciary in next year’s federal budget.

Pending Senate approval next week, 13 of the 14 special funds used to finance employee benefits will be closed. The lower house of Congress approved the measure on Tuesday.

Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who floated the cuts in Congress, blamed senior legal officials for inciting the strike. That prompted courthouse workers to call for unity, chanting “we are all the federal judiciary” and cheering when judges joined the picket line.

The strike will last at least until an open session of the lower house of Congress on Tuesday, which leaders of the Federal Judiciary Workers Union plan to attend. Some 50,000 federal court workers are expected to join the strike, the union’s Assistant Secretary General Adrian Almaraz told The Associated Press.

Eduardo Pacheco is a court officer who normally works on “amparos,”a form of constitutional injunction, at the San Lázaro court. He said the cuts were a threat not just to workers, but the integrity of the judicial system.

“In the legislative branch there are people who are not educated, they don’t have a university degree; they’re just elected,” he said, adding the federal courts serve as a check and balance on political power.

“You ask a congress member ‘what is this article talking about?’ and they don’t know,” Pacheco said. “They don’t study. We have to study and prepare.”

Local courts across the country will be unaffected by the strike and, in a press release Thursday morning, the federal judiciary said it would continue to work remotely on urgent cases, “to preserve the right of access to justice for all Mexicans.”

Mexican courts are not known for their speed or efficiency and it was unclear how much public support the strikers could expect. One court recently handed down sentences against five soldiers in the 2010 killing of two university students, after legal proceedings that lasted almost 13 years.

López Obrador downplayed the impact of the strike in an address Thursday morning.

In federal courts “nothing happens because (the judges) are only there to free white collar criminals,” he said in his morning news conference. “They do not impart justice. … They only impart justice to the powerful.”

The president also tried to downplay the significance of the cuts themselves, promising the trusts’ closure would not affect most court workers, only trim “the privileges” of magistrates.

Workers “will not be harmed in any way. It is my word,” said López Obrador, adding the cuts would be used to fund 2 million scholarships for poor elementary school children.

Víctor Francisco Mota Cienfuegos, a federal magistrate of over 30 years, said the president had lied to workers.

“The discourse that only the ministers and magistrates benefit is false,” he said from the picket line Thursday. “That is a lie. These trusts have existed since the last century and are for the benefit of the workers.”

In response to the cuts, the Supreme Court stressed that the endangered funds were meant to pay for pensions and medical benefits for up to 55,000 judicial workers. Operational staff like typists and guards are more likely to be affected than magistrates, said Lourdes Flores, the union’s undersecretary.

López Obrador has clashed with the judicial branch of the Mexican government in the past, accusing judges of entrenched corruption and privilege when they blocked his energy and electoral reforms, for example.

While López Obrador’s criticism of the judiciary has escalated in recent months, Cienfuegos said it has been a consistent tenet of the president’s term.

From the top of the courthouse steps, Patricia Aguayo Bernal, a secretary of Mexico City’s labor court, called striking workers to join a march through the Mexico City center on Sunday and to peacefully protest outside Congress during their open meeting next week.

Daniel Shailer, The Associated Press