MEXICO CITY — While all eyeballs in Mexico were glued to the presidential election this month, the seats of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies were quietly being filled.
By the “unpresentable ones.”
Mexico’s Congress presents the ‘unpresentable ones’
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As they are known in the Mexican news media, los impresentables are legislators whose names do not appear on ballots, who often do not campaign, who, in fact, may be kept out of sight. But based on how many overall votes their respective parties receive at the polls, they are named to the legislature.
They are some of the most powerful people in Mexico.
They include the heads of major unions — or their grandchildren. Party stalwarts or party hacks, depending on one’s point of view (and party). And the president’s younger sister.
They are former governors, government ministers, plus a presidential spokesman or two, and the infamous ex-mayor of Monterrey. These pols are called legisladores chapulines, or grasshoppers, who jump from post to post.
And a lot of them, coincidentally, are current or former executives and associates for Mexico’s duopolistic television broadcasters, who are facing the specter of having their airwaves opened to competition.
The composition of the Mexican Congress is the product of the country’s proportional system of parliamentary representation. It is constitutional, time-honored and sometimes a little embarrassing.
In the Chamber of Deputies, 300 seats are won by direct vote, while 200 are distributed among the parties, in proportion to how many votes overall each party won. In the Senate, which has 128 seats, 96 go to top vote-getters and 32 are the “proportional members.”
These proportional seats often go to political heavy hitters who work the back rooms in their respective parties, the seats awarded to repay favors or to share power among interest groups or, to put it in the most favorable light, to keep the best and brightest — be they popular or not — in the nation’s deliberative body.
Another advantage in Mexico: Being in Congress grants a politico immunity from prosecution.
“While the political parties will deny this, there have been lawmakers over the years that are relieved to find that once they are in Congress, it is more difficult for investigators to question them, to bring them to trial,” said Jeffrey Weldon, a political analyst at the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, a private research university in Mexico City.
Places for family members
Among the freshman class in the new Congress will be both the grandson and daughter of the second most powerful person in Mexico, Elba Esther Gordillo, the “president for life” of Mexico’s teachers union, who presides over a public education system where teachers buy and sell their jobs and student tests put Mexico’s kids at the bottom of developed nations.
No one here is really surprised that Gordillo’s party gave its lone Senate seat to her daughter.
Family matters.
President Felipe Calderon’s sister, Luisa Maria Calderon, will go to the Senate, after she was rejected earlier this year in her bid to be elected governor of the western state of Michoacan. The niece of Calderon’s wife is also going to Congress.
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