MEXICO CITY>> For months, tensions have been building in Mexico over the president’s sweeping plans to overhaul the judiciary, straining diplomatic ties with the United States and shaking the country’s political system.

This week, those tensions exploded into the open.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico said Tuesday that his government was “pausing” relations with the U.S. Embassy in response to criticism by the U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar over the final crusade of his six-year presidential term.

“Hopefully there will be a statement from them that they are going to be respectful of the independence of Mexico,” López Obrador said of the United States during his daily news conference. “As long as that doesn’t happen and they continue with that policy, then there is a pause with the Embassy.”

“ ‘Pause’ means that we are going to take a break,” he added, saying it would also extend to the U.S. State Department. And in a possible bid to ease concerns over the potential effect on trade, López Obrador also said that overall U.S.-Mexico relations would not be affected.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico and the Mexican Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

López Obrador also announced a pause in relations with the Canadian Embassy, which had conveyed Canadian investors’ concerns over the judicial overhaul.

In a statement, several ranking members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee expressed “deep concern” that the proposed changes could contradict commitments Mexico made in the 2020 trade agreement between it, Canada and the United States.

The president’s freezing of diplomatic relations with the U.S. Embassy comes after comments made last week by Salazar, the U.S. ambassador and a former U.S. senator from Colorado, calling the proposed judicial changes “a major risk to the functioning of Mexico’s democracy.” Salazar asserted that the measures could threaten Mexico’s trade relationship with the United States by corroding confidence in Mexico’s legal framework and emboldening drug cartels to “take advantage of politically motivated and inexperienced judges.”

Mexico’s newly elected Congress could start voting as early as next week on the changes proposed by López Obrador. If passed, they would shift the entire judiciary from an appointment system largely based on specialized training and qualifications to one where just about anyone with a law degree and a few years of experience could run in elections to become a judge.

The measure could force more than 5,000 judges, from the Supreme Court down to local district courts, from their jobs.

Thousands of federal judges and court workers have already joined nationwide strikes, and hundreds of protesters took to the streets in more than 20 Mexican cities on Sunday, in hopes of bringing attention to what they called an attack against the judiciary.

López Obrador says the overhaul is needed to prevent impunity and rulings that allow drug traffickers to go free.