The Government of Mexico presented this Wednesday in Congress a reform to article 33 of the Constitution, that allows the expulsion of foreigners for “interfering” in politics and that in recent years has caused controversyparticularly by Spaniards.
The text of the reform, received at the Chamber of Deputiesintends to retouch the first and second paragraphs, and repeal the third, ensures that foreigners “will enjoy the human rights and guarantees” of the ConstitutionTherefore, “their right to the free expression of ideas is guaranteed”.
The Government, however, reserves the right to expel foreigners when it is proven that their stay in Mexico constitutes “a risk or affectation of national security”always after a hearing and when the administrative procedures before the competent authority have been exhausted.
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Article 33, as it is now drafted, allows “expulsion from the national territory of foreigners”which are prohibited “in any way from interfering in the political affairs of the country.”
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Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador He already announced the proposal last Monday in his morning press conference and justified it by pointing out that before “anyone who was considered a pernicious foreigner because he questioned the Government was deported.”
The clause has aroused controversy in recent years, such as last December, when the former president Felipe Calderon (2006-2012) asked to use the article against the Spanish Abraham Mendieta, adviser and supporter of the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena).
That same month, the Ministry of the Interior (Segob) removed the French singer from the list of non grata persons. Manu Chaowho in 2009 criticized the Government of Mexico, then Calderón’s, for the repression of the protests in San Salvador Atenco in 2006.
While in 2021, supporters of Morena asked to apply Article 33 to the Vox leaders who went to Congress to present the Madrid Charter, something that López Obrador refused.
On the other hand, the Federal Electoral Tribunal decreed in 2018 that the singer Belindawho has Spanish nationality despite living in Mexico, “violated” the Constitution and the electoral law for participating in political acts of Morena.
And in 2014 there was a controversy with Chile over the arrest of the Chilean musician Lawrence Maxwell Ilabaca during a protest after the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students in September of that year.
There should be nothing that limits freedom and all those alleged crimes that have to do with insulting authority must be eliminated,” López Obrador considered last Monday.
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