On the anniversary of its adoption, President Felipe Calderón praised the Mexican Constitution as the foundation of "a modern and vigorous state" - and then called for an overhaul of the document."The nation is confronting new 21st-century circumstances demanding that we move forward ... to modernize our constitutional and legal framework," Calderón said Monday.
The president was speaking at the National Palace in Mexico City´s Historic Center, during a ceremony honoring the 1857 Constitution and its 1917 successor. Both were enacted on the same day, February 5, now a national holiday.
Calderón said that any renovation of the Constitution would take place within the legal structure mandated by the very document that would be changed.
"That´s why I´m calling for a renovation of the law from within the law, a renovation of the Constitution from within the Constitution," he said.
The Constitution has undergone piecemeal revision almost constantly since the current version was enacted during the Revolution. Much major legislation, usually called "reforms," involves constitutional amendments or rewritten language.
Many legal scholars and elected officials from across the political spectrum contend that only major surgery will purge the document of its weaknesses, including inconsistencies and anachronisms. It has often been pointed out, for example, that one article of the Constitution establishes monopolies while another forbids them.
Interested parties disagree, however, about what kind of process would best serve a constitutional overhaul. Recent renovation calls before Calderón´s have come from the Convergence Party, three-time Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and last October from the newly formed political coalition consisting of the PRD, Convergence and the Labor Party.
Mechanisms proposed for enacting a revision of the Constitution include 1) a special congressional commission, 2) a constitutional council comprised of federal and local legislators, party officials, legal experts and citizens, and 3) a full-blown constitutional convention.
Calderón didn´t specify a preferred route to constitutional reform, or how radical a makeover his word "renovate" implies, but he did stress that the effort would need to be a cooperative one.
"All the political actors will have to work together without falling into the same quarrels or repeating the errors that have kept us from achieving the results that Mexicans expect," he said.
The PRD, the chief opposition party, leans in favor of a major overhaul. "Felipe Calderón is taking up a proposal already made by the PRD and the left," said party secretary general Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo.
"(But) if the content he wants in a new Constitution includes privatizing (the national oil monopoly) Pemex or electricity, we won´t be in favor of it," he said.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the political heirs to the 1917 constitutional assembly in Querétaro that ruled under the document for seven decades, came out in favor of targeted reforms rather than a new document.
Alfredo Ríos Camarena, a PRI deputy, pointed out that the Constitution itself rules out being replaced, since it establishes no provision for a new constitutional convention.
