If No One Else Can...

José Antonio Crespo makes a compelling case that although the Supreme Court is not the first line of defense in criminal justice, we should welcome its growing activism:

The principal reason that some of the cases that most aggravate Mexican society have arrived to the highest court via the constitutional article 97, is that the institutions that dole out justice and thoroughly investigate some of those ultrajes coming from the powerful simply don’t do so.

One group of justices, who normally take conservative positions, hold that the court shouldn’t immerse itself in cases that should first be investigated and punished by other institutions, established exactly for those purposes. Technically they are correct, but precisely for the reason that such institutions don’t work (or they work very badly, owing to the traditional inefficiency or because of political considerations) the court can contribute to moving a machinery atrophied because of lack of use. The conservative position is based on the premise that we live in a normal democracy, in which investigative and criminal justice institutions function reasonably well and, as a result, the intervention of the court doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Put evidently we don’t live in that normal democracy, but rather in a country of impunity (which is to say, the exact opposite of democracy).

Well argued. I hasten to point out that Mexico's system clearly is not the "exact opposite" of democracy, it's just an imperfect democracy. He makes a country that, for all its defects, has made substantial progress over the past two decades sound like the Stalinist USSR. For all his insight, Crespo regularly displays a tendency to overstate the degree of Mexico's political shortcomings. Take the finale to the previous column:

We also shouldn’t go overboard with our optimism and wrongly believe that in the country of impunity it will be possible to hold to account the truly responsible parties, who are located at the cusp of state or federal power. That would be too much to ask.

I realize that he was probably writing with his tongue placed squarely in his cheek, but why such cynicism? A little skepticism is of course warranted in Mexico, but the blind anti-faith that the truly guilty will never be found is both destructive and thoughtless. If that were the case, why bother writing?