Outsourcing Justice

Both hearings of General Santoyo in front of the judge in the court of Virginia, where he’s been accused of drug trafficking, were very quick.

Among the formalities, it is hard to understand what’s going on. The general entered the first time in an untucked blue shirt. Surely he was hiding the penitentiary belt that they cuff his hands to during transportation. When he sat, a federal marshal had to get close and order him, through an interpreter, to put his hands on the table. That’s the law in the United States.

The whole show was humiliating. It surely is for Santoyo, a man with medals on his lapel and is the highest ranking official of the National Police, who had to sit on the bench of a U.S. justice, be touched by sheriffs who had barely reached puberty and be forced to defend himself in a language that he barely knows.

Somehow you also feel humiliated. Regardless of whether Santoyo is innocent or guilty, to delegate justice to another country in such a rampant manner bothers the nationalist vein.

If he’s innocent, as you have to presume, it’s painful that the president of one country, an ex-president, and their colleagues pressed a general to surrender and respond to charges made in another country. The charges were made from the testimonies of a selection of criminals that look to tarnish more people to get benefits.

If he’s guilty, his crime would have been to “conspire to import five or more kilos of cocaine.” Although this “conspiracy” involved giving orders about who to kill in exchange for money, they are going to sentence him in another country for being a smuggler of illicit powder, not for being a murderer, not for being a traitor.

I understand that the indignation for extradition is a feeling that has been processed in the Colombian couch, with its drug traffickers, bombers and constitutional crooks, for years. And maybe it is anachronistic to try to wake it up just for having been sitting there while they dictated sentences to the general under the seal of the bold eagle.

There’s a pragmatic logic to being the country that extradites the second largest amount of people to the United States in the world. We still have so many criminals that there are no jails left, no judges that stand it and no Congress to build a system that can handle it. Before, one would say in a fit of reality that it’s fortunate that the Americans accept without distinction our drug traffickers, paramilitaries, guerrilla fighter and cops as long as they’ve imported cocaine.

So then Montealegre, the Attorney General, will come to give thanks to Attorney General Holder and ask him to not give them such low sentences. Now, this is not even to hide appearances, which at this point are so faded that no one cares, but again, it is in a fit of pragmatism: The ones we are sending to the United States are returning too quickly. Yes, that’s the reality of our justice. It is sad and worth remembering.