Mexican envoy’s nomination to high court draws fire
MEXICO CITY — Possibly not since Clarence Thomas was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991 has a high court candidate been so controversial.
In this case, we are talking about Mexico. And the nominee to the Mexican Supreme Court is the ambassador to the United States, Eduardo Medina Mora.
The joke in Mexico is that Medina Mora “fails upward.” He has been associated with a string of disasters, yet his career advances.
Medina Mora, who has close professional and personal ties to President Enrique Peña Nieto, headed the domestic intelligence agency — roughly equivalent to the United States’ National Security Agency — under the lackluster government of President Vicente Fox.
Then he was attorney general, the top legal official at a time when Mexico was plunging into a war with drug cartels that has cost tens of thousands of lives.
From there, he became ambassador to London, followed by his current seat in Washington, the two considered to be the plums of Mexican diplomatic posts.
“I have a very broad experience,” he said this week in congressional hearings, defending his nomination.
Medina Mora has survived governments of different political stripes. And his enemies are many, as witnessed by a slew of commentaries, articles and tough congressional questioning tilted against his nomination.
Under Mexican law, the president nominates three people to fill a single spot on the Supreme Court, vacant this time after the death in December of Justice Sergio Valls Hernandez. The Senate then picks one of the three to join the 11-member court for a 15-year term.
“A man who was in charge of intelligence agencies, named as a candidate to the Supreme Court.... Unimaginable … in any democracy, yet normal here,” columnist Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez lamented.
He has come under criticism for his tenure as attorney general, for trying to overturn a law legalizing abortion in Mexico City (which he acknowledged) and possibly having knowledge (which he denied) of the notorious “Fast and Furious” program, the botched sting in which the United States allowed drug traffickers to funnel high-powered weapons into Mexico.
The ambassador’s tenure in Washington has been fairly low key but impressive to many observers there.
Michael Shifter, president of the Washingtonbased Inter-American Dialogue, which invited Medina Mora to several conferences, said the ambassador had a “good antenna” for issues of importance to the U.S.
Medina Mora went before Mexican lawmakers this week to testify about his qualifications and possible conflicts of interest. So pressed was he on ties to Peña Nieto that at one point he testified that he and the president were not the godfathers to each other’s children, a particularly cherished relationship.
The Senate is expected to vote on the nomination in the next few days.