The pervasive presence of the “rule of law” rhetoric in legal and political argument in Mexico has never been higher. At the sunset of the second transition government of the liberal democratic party Acción Nacional (National Action), legal institutions face the starkest contrast in our recent history. On the one hand, a fully operating bureaucracy runs day to day government affairs in 32 federal entities, imposing taxes, making and applying laws for over 112 million people, and speak proudly of our legal institutions – those we have, those we need, those we need to change.

Yet, at the same time, federal, state and municipal authorities face the worst rates of violence and loss of human life in the past 50 years. The formerly called war against drug traffic is the main federal policy to control organized crime (for the discussion on the Mexican war against drugs see Mexican Drug Traffic). In this context, federal legislation has been amended to grant ever increasing powers to the executive branch in the areas of security, intelligence and criminal procedure - with the consequent encroachment upon individual rights. Since 2009, the Executive has requested Congress to approve national security legislation that would enable federal authorities to support local governments in a situation short of emergency, displaying military and naval forces. This episode of turmoil in Congress has evidenced public and private clashes within the federal cabinet, civil society organizations, and the main political parties. No agreement exists on whether the constitutional order would be subverted if this legislation is approved. Most interestingly for the purposes of this discussion, no agreement exists on whether the rule of law admits installments; and whether a state exists that is neither “business as usual”, nor an emergency in the sense of modern constitutional and international law. Mexican authorities propose the creation of a third option, in the name of the rule of law.

The voices we hear in the Mexican context sound all too familiar ten years after the beginning of the global war on terror. Sadly, the terror discourse in Mexico keeps gaining momentum even after the rhetoric of the war on terror has been publicly condemned, and the mistakes of that strategy continue to be investigated and corrected.

This example of the current Mexican reality is handy to depict what has been sometimes described as lawlessness. The clockwork operation of the formerly unbeatable Partido Revolucionario Institucional gained Mexico the tag of the “perfect dictatorship” in the words of 2010 Nobel Prize win laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa. Today, the failed state doctrine aside, the deepest concern among some scholars and professionals in the fields of justice and human rights in Mexico is a feeling of a never ending political transition. A new ruling party has brought important developments to our legal institutions, but impunity for criminals in and out of government remains rampant (Acosta 2010 provides for a critical description of the implications of political transition and human rights).

Against this backdrop, the inquiry into the meaning of the rule of law in our legal culture is timely and necessary. These paragraphs will attempt to describe the actual content of the “rule of law” as a concept in Mexican legal culture, using the sources of Mexican law.