Mexican lawmakers vote to end presidential immunity

On Tuesday, a proposal to allow for the prosecution of Mexican presidents for a wide range of crimes overwhelmingly passed the lower house of Congress , giving the proposal backed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador a shot of momentum.

Under current law, presidents can only be prosecuted for treason .

If ratified by the Mexican Senate and then passed by a majority of state legislatures, the proposal would reform the country’s constitution to allow presidents to be charged for crimes including corruption and organized crime .

Lawmakers in the lower house approved the proposal on a vote of 420 to 29 , and it now moves to the Senate .

López Obrador

, who took office late last year, has made rooting out corruption a signature issue of his administration. His MORENA party and its allies control Congress.

Constitutional amendments

in Mexico require two-thirds support in both chambers of Congress, as well as ratification in a majority of Mexico’s state legislatures.

Mario Delgado

, president of the Political Coordination Board and MORENA member, added that next week when the votes for revocation of mandate, referendum, constitutional privileges and tax cancellation by the Executive power “we are going to completely change the figure of the president of the Republic .”

The latter, he said, “[the president] will have political responsibility through the revocation of mandate and referendum, penal responsibility , in the exercise that will be done by the Congress to remove him from his charge in case he commits a crime and fiscal responsibility by giving up the faculty of canceling taxes at his discretion.”

mp