It didn’t even take a day.

The ink was barely dry on Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s energy reform act — which gives priority to public over private sources of energy in the nation’s energy grid — when it was hit with its first legal challenge. The day after the law was signed, a second-district judge issued an injunction against it, conveniently extending his ruling to cover the entire energy sector in order not to give the plaintiffs a “competitive advantage.”

In subsequent days, the injunctions (known in Mexico as amparos) continued to rain down, reaching some thirty-four by week’s end, with dozens more in the pipeline. In a nation where innocent people regularly languish for months or even years in prison due to the lack of a timely amparo, private energy companies had managed to stop the new law in its tracks in less than twenty-four hours.