A serious nation distinguishes between the accusation that is denounced and the guilt that is proven. The United States, this time, made that distinction.
There is an old confusion, as old as diplomacy itself, between the punishment a government withholds and the punishment a court imposes. They are not the same, and the republic that forgets that difference soon finds itself governed not by law, but by suspicion. The recent sequence in the Gonzalo Castillo case – a restored US visa, the exoneration of a Dominican court, the visit of an ambassador – has been read by many as a single gesture of favoritism. Read correctly, in the order in which the events actually occurred, it is something better: the demonstration of how a serious power distinguishes between an accusation and a condemnation, and refuses to allow the former to disguise itself as the latter.
Let’s start with the chronology, because everything depends on it. On May 26, the United States restored Castillo’s ten-year visa. Three days later, on May 29, Judge Altagracia Ramírez, of the Fourth Investigative Court of the National District, issued an order of no merit: the conclusion that the evidence of the Public Ministry did not justify sending it to trial. The visa came first. The failure, later. Those who describe Washington as having “rewarded” a court verdict have the story backwards, and the reversal matters, because it turns an act of principle into the appearance of a favor.
What really solved the case
The facts of Operation Squid deserve precision, not slogans. The scandal, opened in 2023 by the Special Prosecutor’s Office for the Prosecution of Administrative Corruption (PEPCA), denounced a plot of irregular expropriations of land during the administration of Danilo Medina, with overvaluations raised on inflated appraisals and falsified procedures: a fraud on the State estimated at more than nineteen billion pesos. After three years of investigation, Judge Ramírez did not acquit everyone. He sent thirty-five of the forty defendants to trial, including Donald Guerrero, whom the Attorney General’s Office points out as the operational axis of the structure. He discharged five – among them Castillo, the former Administrative Minister of the Presidency José Ramón Peralta and Daniel Guerrero Mena – for lack of sufficient evidence to proceed. The Public Ministry, headed by Deputy Attorney General Wilson Camacho, appealed those five charges, alleging that the court erred in evaluating the evidence.
This is not the portrait of a captured judiciary or a persecuting one. It is a portrait of a court that does the thankless job of separating the probable from the barely alleged: sending the majority to trial, retaining a few and inviting appellate review of the line it drew. A nation should want exactly this. The presumption of innocence is not a courtesy extended to the sympathetic; It is a shield held over everyone—including the powerful and the unpopular—precisely because the day will come when the State will be tempted to condemn based on reputation.
Why a visa is a different instrument
This is where the American decision must be understood on its own terms. A visa is not a verdict. It is a nation’s sovereign judgment about who it admits into its territory: an instrument of foreign policy, not a ruling handed down by a court. When the United States suspended Castillo’s visa after his indictment, it acted out of caution: when a partner nation’s anti-corruption agency makes credible charges, caution is reasonable. But prudence is not the same as permanence. Turning a precautionary suspension into a life sentence—keeping a man banned indefinitely on the basis of an accusation that no court has yet upheld—is letting an indictment do the work of a conviction. That is precisely the investment that a nation dedicated to due process must reject.
So Washington made a decision consistent with its stated principles, rather than betraying them. He refused to treat an unproven charge as established guilt. He restored a document that he had withheld out of caution, once caution had exhausted its meaning and the matter was headed for judicial resolution. What information, what calculation or what reading of the process moved him to act at that precise moment is something that, from the outside, we can only conjecture. But when the court ruled three days later—independently, according to its own evidentiary reasoning—the decision to act in accordance with the presumption of innocence, and not against it, was not reckless, but wise.
Nor was the opportunity necessarily a leap into the void, although this can only be speculated. Calamar’s file was, by then, a matter of public domain: an accusation of thousands of pages, litigated in open hearings for three years, with the case in a state of ruling since the end of March. A government with the analytical resources of the United States—legal officers in its embassy, access to the same documents that any Dominican lawyer could read, and decades of institutional familiarity with the way the PEPCA builds its cases and the way Dominican investigative courts rule—was well placed to assess where the weight of that evidence pointed in the Castillo matter, and perhaps to anticipate the likely shape of the ruling. We do not know—nor can we know from the outside—what information or what reading of the file could have influenced the decision to restore the visa; That belongs to the realm of conjecture. But the most sober conjecture is not that of favor, but that of diligence: acting from a considered reading of a public file is not interfering with a court; It is to do what any serious chancery does before making a consular decision. If that was the logic, Washington did not need to influence the outcome: it was enough for him to read the same documents that the judge read and draw the prudent inference. The court’s finding, three days later, would not have surprised those who had studied the file; I would have confirmed them.
The embassy itself drew the line carefully. On the same day of the ruling, Ambassador Leah Campos reaffirmed that the United States does not comment on individual visa cases, that it maintains a firm commitment to the rule of law, and that it rejects any attempt to manipulate judicial processes for political purposes. That is not the language of someone who puts their finger on the scale. It is the language of a government that insists that its consular decisions and the rulings of a sovereign court are two different things – exactly the distinction that its critics have blurred.
The accusation of interference, reversed
The charge, of course, is that all this amounts to meddling in the 2028 race—that, by reinstating the visa and sending the ambassador to a high-profile meeting, Washington anointed a candidate. But consider the alternative that critics implicitly demand. Had the United States maintained the suspension through what could be years of appeals, it would have imposed a de facto political disqualification on a man its own courts refused to prosecute. That would be interference: the foreign hand keeping a Dominican figure out of the political life of his country long after the Dominican justice system had spoken. Respecting the presumption of innocence is not interfering in an election. Canceling it, indefinitely, from abroad, would be.
This is the coherence that the current US administration has claimed for itself in its broader rejection of the instrumentalization of legal institutions.
And it is worth remembering where that sensitivity comes from, because it is not abstract or recent. He lived it firsthand. For years, the current president of the United States was the target of a judicial offensive unprecedented in North American political history: spectacular raids—federal agents searching the residence of a former president and candidate—, accusations that multiplied in different jurisdictions, prosecutors who seemed to compete for who would take him before a jury first, processes that dragged on among headlines rather than evidence. This display was accompanied by a media frenzy that pronounced the verdict long before any court, and that confused accusation with guilt until they became indistinguishable for the general public. Millions of Americans looked at this with disgust and rejected it for what it was: the conversion of law into a weapon of political conflict, persecution dressed as a process.
Whoever has suffered from this tactic develops a fine ear to recognize it when it reappears in other latitudes. One does not have to stretch the imagination to suppose that that same sensitivity informed Washington’s view of the frenzy that enveloped the Castillo case in the Dominican Republic, where the mere invocation that certain accusations were supported by US investigations was brandished, in the public climate, as if by itself it amounted to proof. It could have been for most of the defendants, those whom the judge sent to trial. Not necessarily for Castillo and the others whom he discharged due to insufficient evidence. An administration chastened by the deliberate confusion between the accusation and the conviction was not willing to repeat it, this time as an involuntary accomplice, against a citizen of a friendly country.
It is not necessary to find PEPCA guilty of any abuse to support this position; The prosecutors presented their case in good faith, the court found it insufficient at this stage, and both institutions deserve respect in their own roles. The point is narrower and firmer: a government should not lend permanence of punishment to a charge that the courts have not proven. And there is an inference that is imposed by its own weight: if the United States had had in its hands evidence that Castillo deserved to sit on the bench along with the others, it would hardly have restored his visa. That he did it says, in the sober language of the facts, more than any statement.
The question that belongs to Dominicans
None of this settles the issue of Castillo himself, and it is not up to Washington to settle it. He carries the shadow of previous accusations and the legitimate scrutiny that the wealth accumulated by any official invites. Whether a figure who passed through Calamar—and whose discharge the Public Ministry is now appealing—deserves the presidency is a question for Dominican voters, weighed at the polls, not for an embassy. Whether the Dominican justice system can deter elite corruption without sliding into selective persecution is a question for Dominican institutions, answered over time, not for a foreign capital.
The American role in all this is the modest and honorable one: to support independent courts by example and assistance, to distinguish scrupulously between its own sovereign instruments and the verdicts of another nation, and to resist the temptation—common to great powers—to confuse its preferences with principles. In light of the actual sequence of events, that is the role Washington played. He acted under the presumption of innocence before the court ruled, and the court’s independent ruling vindicated the act. Dominican democracy will be stronger for deciding Castillo’s future itself. And the United States will be a better partner for having refused, on this occasion, to decide it for her.
Ronald L. Glass is a retired United States Foreign Service officer. The opinions expressed in this article are solely his own and do not represent those of any institution or the United States Government.
