In El Chapo’s Trial, Extraordinary Steps to Keep Witnesses Alive

One can assume that literally anyone who succeeds in getting him out of jail will be given lavish rewards and protection.

He's pretty close to a 4/5/6, an R/W, a J/Z, and maybe a 1 train. That puts him at about 25 minutes from NY Penn, which allows him access to Amtrak or the LIRR.

He's about an hour by public transport from LGA, but that would require a bus. The fastest route to JFK would be 1h11m if he took the A (which isn't all that close) followed by an airtrain. If he chose Newark Airport it'd be something like 25 minutes to NY Penn station + 25 minutes to Newark Penn station and maybe another 10 minutes to Newark Airport via NJ Transit, so about an hour. In other words, from escape to the front door of the airport he's looking at at least an hour of commute, by which point I'd hope someone noticed he's missing.

This all, of course, assumes he takes public transport.

The claim that a a billionaire drug dealer in Mexico has to "escape" by crawling out of a tunnel from a rural Mexican jail is pretty funny.

He probably just walked out and the tunnel was built to make the administration of the jail look less guilty despite the fact they were probably fully aware of what was happening.

The problem with coming in contact with people like Guzman is you can chose between cooperating or misery & death. I'm sure the head of that jail decided he'd cooperate the moment he heard Guzman would be housed there and who can blame him.

It is also located right next to the courthouse and this is the procedure to go to court:

In an article published on April 5, 2011, Jim Dwyer of the New York Times described the experience of an inmate being transferred from the facility to the federal court across the street: A prisoner going to court from the Metropolitan Correctional Center is presented to federal marshals in the basement of the building. Shackled at the ankles, chained at the waist and cuffed at the hands, the prisoner hop-marches through a tunnel nearly 40 feet (12 meters) below the street. The prisoner and escorts go through channels, or corridors, with electronic doors at each end. These are controlled remotely by officers who watch the journey through cameras. More prominent prisoners, who need to be segregated from the general prison population, are housed in the 10-South wing, which is noted for severely confining conditions.

During this passage from jail to court, no one lays eyes on the prisoner except the marshals and the people in the surveillance stations. Once they have reached the north end of the tunnel, they wait for the prisoner elevator. Inside is a locked cage that the prisoner stands in for the ride up to the courthouse cells [1].

I think it is pretty secure.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Departmen...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Correctional_Cent...

Teaching, not nit-picking: "shoot on sight" is the idiom here, meaning shoot as soon as target is visually confirmed. Whereas "on site" relates to location.

And the nightmare for witnesses will continue after the trial, because they're never, ever, going to be safe.

It's not a problem with an easy answer.

I know this is the cornerstone of all law in western countries but its a really difficult thing to argue for in this case.

Osama bin Laden was tried and convicted for the first WTC bombing

> ‘They knew where the target was – third floor, second door on the right,’ the retired official said. ‘Go straight there. Osama was cowering and retreated into the bedroom. Two shooters followed him and opened up. Very simple, very straightforward, very professional hit.’ Some of the Seals were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? The house was shabby and bin Laden was living in a cell with bars on the window and barbed wire on the roof. The rules of engagement were that if bin Laden put up any opposition they were authorised to take lethal action. But if they suspected he might have some means of opposition, like an explosive vest under his robe, they could also kill him. So here’s this guy in a mystery robe and they shot him. It’s not because he was reaching for a weapon. The rules gave them absolute authority to kill the guy.’ The later White House claim that only one or two bullets were fired into his head was ‘bullshit’, the retired official said. ‘The squad came through the door and obliterated him. As the Seals say, “We kicked his ass and took his gas.”’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of...

A defining moment for the US for sure. It showed the war on terror wasn't excusable and that even the most conscious and educated president would still be a hypocrite when it really mattered. It has been downhill ever since with Russia and China doing largely whatever they want.

Agreed, but governments do plenty of abhorrent things.

It would entirely depend on the situation, but without doubt there are levels of crime and depravity I could find myself surrounded by where I'd welcome it. Duterte's extra-judicial killings are far from unpopular. Also: did occupied Western Europe want to be liberated, despite the inevitable collateral damage? I'd expect largely the answer was yes.

https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/1940-the-year-mex...

The drug cartels were losing out on a lot of money too as a result apparently.

https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/1940-the-year-mex...

Decriminalizing drugs also had a similar effect in Portugal. To be honest, I think that if the government really wanted to they could stomp all these cartels out of existence. The problem is that there is a lot of incentive not to.

I believe that law should be modeled after reality, not the other way around. If there is demand for drugs, then there will also be ways to satisfy this demand, legal or not. On the other hand, there is also demand for murder so obviously this problem is not as easy as it seems.

Where does a lawmaker draw the line?

For this to be true, organized crime would have to be largely reliant on drug money. My understanding is they're not. Prohibition fueled the creation of these organizations, but if you're suggesting they've an inability to diversify, that seems questionable.

As much as I'm pro legalise everything, I struggle to come up with a scenario where meth & heroin become legal apart from a kind of "look the other way" method Holland uses for cannabis. But this still involves illegal large scale cultivation and import of product that keeps criminal enterprises alive. Afaik most of the hash sold in Holland is smuggled in illegally from hash producing countries like Morocco, Pakistan, Nepal.

"Make drugs legal" is not actually as an easy a solution as it appears to be.

Worked post WWII most places.

You're conflating two very different situations in regards to Iraq. It's not one Iraq forever war.

There's the Iraq war (Second Persian Gulf War), and there's the Iraq civil war. The Iraq war, versus Saddam's regime, ended very quickly. That war was won trivially. The US could have optionally left at that point if it just wanted to declare an easy victory. Civil wars can go on forever (and given Iraq was a forced together nation of three major groups that dislike each other, it's likely going to).

The US achieved its primary goal in Afghanistan very quickly as well. It wiped out nearly all the organizing and attack projection capabilities that Al Qaeda had in using Afghanistan as a haven. The primary objective was not to kill all the Taliban. The Taliban was a different, optional objective. Afghanistan, like Iraq, is now a civil war between multiple factions that all want power.

Probably best to fight for those civil liberties we take for granted.

A political system encompasses both a legal process and a system of allocating power. Extrajudicial means not authorized, but it doesn't imply the power exercised was illegitimate. Rather, it suggests the power was legitimate. Contrast that with a murderer, who never possessed any legitimate power to take a life, let alone take one according to some legal right. Cold comfort but in principle a meaningful distinction, especially if you agree that power is principally defined and circumscribed by the office, and only secondarily by the rules for executing that office.

For the sake of argument, let's say the drug scourge was truly an immediate and existential threat to the Philippine polity. Duterte's mistake wasn't to unleash vigilante death squads, it was to admit to and purport to authorize the death squads. If he had (1) quietly unleashed the death squads, (2) creating plausible deniability and permitting the existence of the fiction that the state wasn't involved, and crucially (3) left himself and the vigilantes exposed in principal to punishment for exercising power without legal right, then there would have been no substantial injury to the rule of law.

It's like civil disobedience--it nominally violates the law but as long as you're willing to accept the legal consequences the rule of law isn't injured. You're putting yourself at the mercy of the law in service to the law.

It's why I absolutely opposed the Bush-era and Obama-era strategies to "legalize" various tactics in the War on Terror, and would have preferred the status quo ante where the president exercised unchecked powers. Both Bush (notwithstanding "Unitary Executive" advisers) and Obama argued Congressional authorization made the executive more accountable. But it made the executive less accountable because now it had both the power (slightly diminished, maybe) and the legal right where once it only had the power. Legalization corrupted our law and our morality by authorizing behaviors that should never be authorized, merely tolerated as a practical matter.

Previously, as long as both Congress and the People believed an exigency legitimate they had the option of looking the other way, especially if the President never admitted it and maintained enough restraint to maintain the polite fiction. By leaving themselves exposed to punishment the President and his agents are incentivized to restrain themselves and as a practical matter limited to exercising their powers in situations and in a manner that doesn't openly flout the rule of law--in other words, precisely those contexts where the rule of law is already inoperable or under existential threat.

As with civil disobedience, however, the solution to the paradox requires selflessness and credible risk of self-sacrifice. The existence of such leadership seems as scare as it ever has been.

The parallels with Socrates' trial and death are not coincidental, though it was by putting together the above theory that led me to a fuller understanding (I think) and greater appreciation of the story.

How might this work with El Chapo, presuming reasonable necessity? From a position of legitimate power (President, General), arrange and permit his extrajudicial assassination by an otherwise respectable citizen (i.e. not a rival, though perhaps a victim if public sympathy is important) willing to face public prosecution (not to mention cartel reprisal) for the promise (not guarantee) of a commuted sentence. It's risky--how do you know when the rule of law is existentially threatened, or that an act is reasonably necessary in defense? But at least the risk of punishment faced by all parties serves to sharpen judgement and, if necessary, is available to remedy any harm to the rule of law if the judgement was in fact mistaken. Moreover, at least in the West sentencing rules typically mandate proportionality (a function of moral culpability, among other things)[1], and while extrajudicial acts could easily mandate swift and severe punishment, in principle leniency is also permitted so judgment needn't be flawless.

[1] Mandatory minimums are, strictly speaking, unconstitutional at the U.S. Federal level as SCOTUS has declared sentencing ultimately the peculiar purview of the trial court, recognizing that proportionality necessarily requires one to account for the innumerable facts and context of the case in a way impossible to accomplish a priori. Mandatory sentencing is a legal contradiction, at least from the perspective of Western morality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplock_courts

With the benefit of hindsight they appear to have done more harm than good in that they played into the Republican strategy of making NI ungovernable by normal means.