Mario López Ayala, PhD
When the law bends, power is set free
Mexico , April 2026
In the contemporary ecosystem of power, legality has ceased to function as a structural limit and has instead become a negotiable variable. For decades, it operated as a system of institutional containment; today, across multiple geographies, it is increasingly reconfigured as a selective instrument of protection. Within this quiet—though not invisible—shift emerges an uncomfortable category: certificates of impunity, a phenomenon closely tied to political impunity, state capture, and institutional erosion across different systems of governance. They do not exist on paper, nor are they publicly decreed; yet they operate with surgical precision in the circuits where it is decided who answers to the law and who simply moves beyond it.
These certificates are not anomalies; they are architecture. They are constructed through seemingly technical legal reforms, the gradual capture of key institutions, the calculated erosion of checks and balances, and a sophisticated engineering of public discourse that often escapes immediate detection. In political economy terms, what unfolds is a redistribution of risk: legal uncertainty is socialized, while protection is privatized among elites. The result is not the absence of law, but its differentiated application. Impunity does not eliminate the law; it administers it, calibrates it, reshapes it.
Recent history offers warnings that are not always read as such. Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe) transformed political loyalty into a form of institutional shielding until economic deterioration rendered the system unsustainable. Muamar el Gadafi (Libya) normalized impunity as a governing principle, though its eventual collapse exposed the fragility of that model. Viktor Yanukovych (Ukraine) operated within frameworks of institutional capture that were ultimately overwhelmed by social pressure. In Latin America, Alberto Fujimori (Peru) demonstrated that even highly sophisticated systems of protection can be reversed, while Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela) represents a contemporary case in which political continuity coexists with persistent concerns over institutional quality. In Central America, Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua) has consolidated a model in which checks and balances have been progressively neutralized.
In Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador has stood at the center of intense debates regarding the redefinition of the balance between executive power, autonomous institutions, and accountability mechanisms. This is not merely about specific decisions, but about how the margin of action is recalibrated within existing institutional frameworks. The Mexican case illustrates something broader: even within formal democracies, legality can be stretched to the point of becoming functional to the very power that invokes it.
The phenomenon, however, is not confined to contexts of fragile institutionalization. In Europe, Viktor Orbán(Hungary) represents one of the most studied cases of institutional reconfiguration under formally legal frameworks. In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson faced political crises that exposed the limits of institutional shielding within consolidated democracies. In Africa, Jacob Zuma (South Africa) illustrated how state capture can operate from within formally democratic structures. In North America, Donald Trump (United States) has been at the center of intense debates over the scope of executive power in highly polarized contexts.
From an anthropological perspective, these mechanisms function as contemporary rituals of legitimation. Forms are preserved, procedures are repeated, and the language of legality is invoked. Yet the substance shifts. Justice does not disappear; it is staged. Citizens observe hearings, speeches, and normative frameworks, but rarely witness proportional consequences. In this context, impunity does not need to fully conceal itself; it merely needs to be administered with consistency.
The psychological impact is less visible, but no less significant. The repeated absence of sanctions generates social habituation; expectations of justice gradually adjust downward. A form of institutional learned helplessness emerges: the perception that no individual or collective effort can alter the outcome. This mental state reduces the political cost of impunity and, in a sense, renders it functional. When society ceases to expect justice, power ceases to anticipate it.
At the geopolitical level, certificates of impunity operate as a form of transactional currency. States, corporations, and transnational actors negotiate stability, access to resources, or strategic alignments in exchange for implicit tolerance of questionable practices. It is not always explicit. In various regions, this logic has sustained fragile equilibria under an unspoken premise: as long as the system does not collapse, accountability can be deferred.
The economic dimension introduces another layer. When rules can be reinterpreted from positions of power, market incentives become distorted. Competition shifts away from efficiency or innovation toward proximity to decision-making centers. An environment emerges in which access to these certificates—whether named or not—shapes the distribution of opportunity. Impunity, in this sense, ceases to be a side effect.
Yet any system that institutionalizes impunity accumulates internal tensions. The erosion of trust, the outflow of human capital, disinvestment, and social fragmentation may not be immediate, but neither do they dissipate. The question is not strictly when rupture occurs, but how it manifests. Sometimes abruptly, sometimes diffusely. In either case, the cost tends to exceed the initial benefits of institutional shielding.
To name certificates of impunity is to recognize that contemporary power operates both in the visible and the invisible. It is to accept that the quality of democracies, the stability of economic systems, and the resilience of political systems erode in that space where the law ceases to be universal. Not a fixed point, but a gradual displacement.
Because when the law ceases to be a limit, it also ceases to be a refuge. And when it ceases to be a refuge, power no longer needs to hide… but it can no longer do so either.
Mario López Ayala, PhD
Researcher and Director of Phoenix24