Counselors Jaime Rivera, Dania Ravel, and Claudia Zavala bid farewell to the General Council of the National Electoral Institute (INE) during their last in-person session prior to April 4th, the day their appointed term concludes. They called on the remaining counselors and the Electoral Professional Service to continue to resist attempts to weaken the institution's autonomy. Rivera stated that during his term, the INE has faced difficult circumstances, such as the siege on its autonomy and the persecution against him and the two outgoing counselors, stemming from their vote in favor of suspending the recall mandate. Zavala expressed that in her nine years as a counselor, she had the opportunity to participate in organizing two presidential elections and novel processes such as the recall mandate, popular consultation, and judicial elections. These processes, she added, were characterized by pressures against the INE, 'generically, as if the institute were exclusively the counselors with whom power had disagreements, and not that great team of more than 17 thousand colleagues'. Raffel affirmed that upon leaving her post, she is leaving an institution very different from the one she joined in 2017, as 'it is evident that we have lived through important changes in the composition and powers of the General Council, as well as in the dynamics of collegiate work and even in the construction of consensus'.
