U.S. citizens are familiar with recent attempts to enshrine a right to abortion in state constitutions via constitutional amendments.
(An attempt in Florida failed in the 2024 election cycle, while others suceeded.) And many are familiar with the controversial but successful drive by now ex-president Lopez Obrador (AMLO) to drastically alter the Mexican judicial system by a constitutional amendment.
But foreigners in Mexico must be stunned to learn that national leaders plan to amend the Mexican constitution to ban GMO corn and even vaping, and that the bans are imminent. (Guadalajara Reporter, Dec. 21, 2024, and Jan. 4, 2025). To foreigners, it must seem strange that AMLO’s and President Sheinbaum’s Morena party is set to push the ban on vapes and similar products by adding one more to the 700-plus amendments that have been made in the century since the 1917 Constitution. (In contrast, the U.S. Constitution, nearly 250 years old, has been amended a mere 27 times. And the Canadian document, since the country received full sovereignty in 1982, has been amended just 13 times.)
Behind the shock over the imminent vape amendment surely lurks a conviction that constitutions should focus on lofty affairs—free speech, the rights of the accused—as in U.S. amendments.
Mexico’s constitution, too, enshrines broad goals—public education, separation of church and state, the labor movement and land reform. Yet scholars in a 2024 article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America were perplexed at the “overwhelming frequency” of amendments, considering that Mexico’s requirements for approval of amendments are “stringent.”
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