Methodology, categories and evidentiary limits
How allegations are organized and how their documentary, conceptual and analytical relationships are distinguished.
1. Scope and sources
The corpus examined comprises the original 2011 indictment and versions S1 (2019), S2 (2020), S4 (2025, made public in 2026) and S5 (2026) in case 11 Cr. 205 (AKH), before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The 2023 superseding information (S3) concerns Clíver Antonio Alcalá Cordones. Its analysis and coding remain pending because its full text is not publicly available. S3 is marked as pending because the document is unavailable, rather than as lacking particular thematic categories.
What the records are and why they were created
To make the filings easier to read and compare, selected passages were organized into documentary records. Each record presents an allegation, an episode, a statement of the prosecution's theory or a procedural change. It includes a summary and a reference to the original document, paragraph and page, preserving individual attributions. The records make it possible to trace how allegations appear, recur or expand across the different indictments and to explore their relationships in both panels.
The 37 records are a selection focused on mechanisms of corruption, institutional subordination, violence and victimization. They do not seek to describe every event or allegation in the case.
2. Legal nature of the material
A criminal indictment documents what the prosecution alleges. The existence of a criminal charge is a procedural fact.
The site's texts are analytical paraphrases. To check the scope of each paraphrase, each record retains the relevant document, paragraph, page and caveats. Identified individuals are presented by their full names where the source permits. Individuals anonymized in the sources retain the exact designations used in the filings, such as Official-2, CC-1 or Victim-2.
3. Units of analysis
Each record E01–E37 covers an allegation, episode, statement of the prosecution's theory or procedural change. The classification distinguishes the nature of the statement, the conduct, the alleged purpose, the type of victimization and the specificity of the attribution.
The relationships between records L01–L21 may represent the reiteration of an allegation, narrative development, a thematic parallel, the continuity of a mechanism or an analytical relationship. Each link retains its relationship type and the episodes it connects.
Each relationship described in the documents is recorded by identifying to whom an action is attributed (sender or AC1), what the action consists of (interaction), and toward whom or what it is directed (recipient or AC2). The entity types at both ends of the relationship and the source court document are also recorded. Not every relationship connects two people; its second endpoint may be an institution, procedure, activity, territory or object. The coded units therefore do not constitute a count of independent events or a network of unique edges.
4. Two panels with different functions
Panel 1: evolution of the filings
This panel traces when an allegation is explicitly presented in the documents examined and when it is repeated, expanded or incorporated by reference. “No record” does not mean that the conduct is absent from the indictment; it means there is no coded thematic record for that combination in the selection.
S5 expressly incorporates the allegations of S4 through a note on page 2. The omission of a detail from S5 should not automatically be interpreted as abandonment of an allegation in S4.
Panel 2: mechanisms and relationships
This panel examines nine analysis pathways. Some reconstruct theories expressly stated by the prosecution; others organize coercive episodes or compare allegations involving similar mechanisms. Each pathway distinguishes documentary attributions, structural interpretation and elements relevant to proving the prosecution's allegations during the proceedings. The analytical questions in each pathway guide examination of the proposed relationships between those allegations.
The site distinguishes alleged sequences of events, parallels between documents and causal relationships, and identifies the scope of each link.
5. Interpretive cautions
The presence, repetition or length of an allegation does not by itself measure the actual frequency of crimes, the extent of victimization or the degree of criminal responsibility. Nor does it support an inference that illicit benefits financed a specific act of torture without an independent reconstruction of the financial flows, decisions and evidence.
When the prosecution describes the distribution of benefits and repression as complementary mechanisms, the site presents that functional relationship and distinguishes its components and individual attributions. In episodes of judicial subordination, instructions, announced incentives and acts of torture are identified separately.
6. Updates and traceability
Each record and its connections retain stable identifiers. New filings in the proceedings must be added without replacing earlier filings. Every substantive correction requires a precise source reference, an explanation of the change, preservation of earlier versions and human review of the relationships.
The database expediente.json ↓ contains the records and coding; mecanismos.json ↓ contains the pathways in the second panel. The PDFs are retained individually in the documentary archive.
The JSON downloads retain the original Spanish coding. English translations are provided for use within the site; both languages share the same record identifiers and court document references.