Mexico City, February 26. Thousands of citizens and nearly 80 organizations packed the Zócalo in Mexico City on Sunday to demand Supreme Court ministers backtrack on President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s controversial “Plan B” electoral reform, whom they accuse of jeopardize the autonomy and reliability of the elections leading to the presidential elections of 2024.
People, including minors and the elderly, arrived at Plaza de la Constitución, the country’s main public square, from 9 a.m. (1500 GMT) and left around noon (1800 GMT).
According to organizers of the mass rally, not only the capital’s Zócalo was filled, but also the streets surrounding it, with at least half a million Mexicans demanding to roll back the controversial “Plan B” which they say is intended to “return” the National Electoral Institute (INE), with a reduction in human and budgetary resources.
In front of the National Palace and the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), the citizens, dressed in pink and white, shouted in unison “my vote is not affected”, “the Court has a mission, to respect the Constitution ” .
This is the second movement carried out in the capital and the country against the changes to the electoral laws proposed by President López Obrador since last December, after Congress rejected his controversial electoral reform with which he proposed the creation of the National Institute of Elections and Consultations (INEC) to replace the current INE, among others.
Among the attendees, retired SCJN minister José Ramón Cossío confided that the current ministers of Mexico’s Supreme Court will stop the so-called “Plan B” because they consider it unconstitutional, although he acknowledged having come under pressure from the National Palace itself.
“So far, ministers have only listened to offensive words from the president and his supporters. Those of us who are here want to speak to you with another language, with the language of trust and respect that corresponds to the democrats. We want to tell them that we know the difficulties that their work entails, the pressures to which they are subjected, from those who want to appropriate the Mexican electoral system,” he stressed.
He said that President López Obrador, who denied there were any risks to the organization of the 2024 presidential elections, maintained that the ministers would be corrupt if they refused to allow these changes to the electoral laws to come into force.
In this sense, Cossío assured that the ministers will consider that “it has serious potential” to affect electoral regulations, that it reduces human and budgetary resources against the autonomy of the INE, and that “unfortunately the rights of women have declined”.
Above all, he warned that a message would be sent that a person can assume that in their plan for government they can do and impose what they want regardless of what the public thinks.
At the time, the journalist and member of the Va por México opposition bloc, Beatriz Pagés, stressed that this INE defense movement was ready to “stand up to the enemies of the Constitution”.
He stressed that on this day a front is being created to win the presidential elections of 2024 and asked the ministers of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) to “send to the dump” the so -so-called electoral “Plan B”. by López Obrador.
Leaders of opposition political parties such as Marko Cortés, president of the conservative National Action Party (PAN); Jesús Zambrano, from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD); Alejandro Moreno, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), as well as the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Santiago Creel.
Likewise, public figures such as businessman and merger promoter Claudio X. González; writer and activist Javier Sicilia, who said he came to defend democracy; former Mexican Foreign Minister and presidential candidate Ángel Gurría, former PAN activist and lawyer Javier Lozano, among others.
At the end of the event, the Mexican national anthem was sung, although there was no flag waving on the flagpole of the Zócalo in the capital, after this Sunday the soldiers did not hoist the national symbol like any other day. EFE
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