Abstract
Mexico’s constitution was modified 45 times in the first half of 2014.
Yet the Zapatistas say their demands for work, land, housing, food, healthcare, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace have forever been ignored.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s constitution is being stripped of its relevance with every passing year: basic rights including freedom of expression are being threatened by an avalanche of constitutional amendments and even existing rights are being eroded by the government’s failure to enforce the rule of law.
After independence in 1810, Mexico adopted several constitutions before settling on the current version which was enacted in 1917 during the ongoing Mexican revolution. Each constitution was derived from the last, but all drew some influence from the United States constitution of 1789, which in turn was partly based on England’s original Magna Carta of 1215.
The Mexican constitution has never been quite as venerated as its US equivalent but throughout the 20th century it remained an important touchstone to which elements of society would cling.
The Mexican left was once “obsessed by invoking elements of the constitution, whether it’s about the freedom of the press, land rights, workers’ rights or the secularisation of education”, said Benjamin Smith, a professor of Mexican history at the University of Warwick.
“People did believe in it for quite a long period of the 20th century. I would say it’s only been the last 20 years since President Carlos Salinas de Gortari got rid of all the socially distributive parts of the constitution that people have really ceased to believe in it,” Dr Smith added.
There have been over 600 amendments to the constitution since 1917. Salinas, who modified the constitution 55 times in six years in order to pass a range of neo-liberal reforms, including the controversial land reform that sparked the Zapatista uprising in 1994, looks, in retrospect, like someone who held the constitution in high regard.
Compare him to the last president, Felipe Calderón, who made 110 changes, and his successor, President Enrique Peña Nieto, who is already well on course to surpass that figure. He made 45 modifications in the first half of 2014 alone, more than in any other year in Mexican history.
Members of the indigenous Zapatista National Liberation Army hold a march in Ocosingo, Chiapas
Credit: Reuters
Most Mexicans are not even aware of many of these changes, much less consulted about them. Recent amendments range from minor alterations to major reforms of the education and energy sectors, aimed at modernising Mexican society and galvanising the underperforming economy.
One of the most controversial recent amendments to Mexico’s constitution, which did provoke public outcry, was that which paved the way for a telecommunications bill passed in July 2014. Although primarily aimed at creating greater competition in this heavily monopolised sector, the legislation provoked major demonstrations with thousands of protesters claiming it infringed the public’s rights to privacy and freedom of expression.
When the new law was proposed, a group of digital rights activists known as ContigenteMX (the Mexican Contingent) and another 13 international organisations wrote an open letter to congress warning of the bill’s implications. The legislation undermined constitutional changes made just a year earlier that were “based on input from unprecedented social and political participation” and promised to “bring Mexico’s digital human rights up to international standards”, the activists claimed.
The activists said the telecom bill “threatens freedom of expression, net neutrality, as well as the right to access opportune and plural information through the internet. It imposes real-time surveillance of people’s communications and movements. It also authorises the state to censor the internet by restricting both publication and access without even a court order.”
The legislation also allowed the government to block mobile phone signals during protests and keep a record of all communications for a period of two years. The bill was passed without public consultation, in spite of the Mexican Senate receiving a petition with over 200,000 signatures in favour of increasing public access to the internet and emphasising the right to public information.
Nevertheless, Mexico’s constitution has never offered quite the robust and clear cut protection of freedom of expression which its defenders claim. Freedom of the press was first established in the constitution of 1824 and it was enshrined again alongside freedom of speech in the 1857 and 1917 versions of the constitution. Articles 6 and 7 of the two most recent editions respectively guarantee freedom of expression and prohibit state censorship.
However, Smith points out a major caveat. “Articles 6 and 7 establish complete freedom of speech and freedom of the press, unless you infringe the law of the press, which is a federal law that curtails journalists’ rights. Many state governments have also passed their own press laws which curtail journalists’ rights even further,” he explained. “So in the 1920s and 1930s loads of journalists were imprisoned, but at the same time the Mexican government was very keen to persuade the outside world – like it is today – that there was freedom of the press, which is central tenet of being a democracy.”
The western state of Sinaloa, for instance, which is notorious for drug-related violence, passed a law in July 2014 which prohibited local journalists from reporting “information related to public safety or law enforcement”, accessing crime scenes or photographing, filming or recording audio of anyone involved in a crime. Under the new law, the media would have been limited to publishing information from official press releases issued by the Sinaloa Attorney General’s office. The law caused such an uproar across Mexico that it was hastily repealed.
The story of the constitution and press freedom in Mexico has not all been about the state restricting the activities of journalists. In fact there have been attempts by the government, through amendments to the constitution in 2012 and 2013, to ensure greater legal protection for journalists, demonstrators and anyone else targeted for exercising their freedom of expression, by allowing the federal authorities to step in when crimes against them are committed. Previously the responsibility for investigating such crimes came under state law but many cases, particularly of murdered journalists, went unsolved.
Basic rights like freedom of expression are being threatened by an avalanche of constitutional amendments
“Until now, the federal authorities, claiming lack of competence over these crimes, have exacerbated impunity,” reported the press freedom watchdog Article 19 at the time. Article 19 said it hoped the reform would “be a step towards combating the environment of impunity for crimes against freedom of expression”, but there has been little evidence of this and none of the murder cases have been solved.
This reflects a much wider problem across Mexico. According to the latest government statistics, only 6.2 per cent of the 33.1 million crimes committed in Mexico last year were investigated, while even fewer of these crimes were ever solved or punished. As recently as October a blogger, who regularly wrote about violent crime and corruption, María del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, known by the pseudonym “Felina”, was kidnapped by armed men, and killed in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The following day a photograph of her body was posted to her Twitter account with messages warning others to be silent.
Also in October, news started to come out about a group of 43 student protesters who had gone missing, presumed kidnapped. After bodies were found in a mass grave in Guerrevo state, accusations circulated of police involvement, and nationwide protests ensued.
In this context of absolute impunity, Mexico’s biggest problem is not the content of its constitution but the government’s complete inability to enforce its existing laws.
