“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law” is a political maxim attributed to Óscar R. Benavides, a military leader who governed Peru in the 1930s. It captures a style of rule in which the same statutes that shield loyalists are turned into weapons against opponents. The phrase endures because it names something that can appear in any legal system where human beings decide whom to investigate and whom to leave alone: the distance between what the law says on paper and how it gets applied in practice.
The saying is cynical by design. It concedes that the written law exists, and then points out that written law does nothing on its own. Someone has to enforce it. Whoever holds that power can reward allies by looking away and punish enemies by looking hard. The rules never change; only the direction of attention does.
Where the Phrase Comes From
Benavides used the line to describe his own governing philosophy during his time in power in Peru. Reward loyalty with protection. Punish opposition with prosecution. The elegance of the formulation, and the reason it has traveled far beyond its origin, is that it doesn’t require corruption in the ordinary sense. No one has to fabricate charges or bribe a judge. The law is applied — that’s the joke. It’s just applied to one group and not the other.
Because the mechanism is selection rather than invention, the maxim describes a vulnerability rather than a specific crime. Any system that gives officials discretion over enforcement creates space for it. And every functional legal system gives officials that discretion, because no prosecutor’s office has the resources to charge every violation it could technically pursue.
How Selective Enforcement Actually Works
Prosecutors at every level of government decide which cases to pursue and which to drop. That discretion is necessary. It also creates the mechanism the maxim describes. A prosecutor who wants to destroy a political rival doesn’t need to invent a crime. They just need to look hard enough at one person while ignoring the same conduct by everyone else.
Much of the damage happens through financial exhaustion rather than conviction. Private criminal defense attorneys charge anywhere from $100 to over $1,000 per hour, and federal cases that reach trial routinely generate six-figure legal bills before a jury is seated. A target who is ultimately acquitted still loses months or years and may be financially ruined. The process itself becomes the punishment, and the government’s resources are effectively unlimited compared to any individual defendant’s.
Selective enforcement rarely looks dramatic from the outside. It can be as quiet as a prosecutor recommending the maximum sentence instead of the standard plea, or an agency choosing to audit one business while ignoring identical conduct by a competitor. Each individual step is technically legal, which is what makes the pattern difficult to challenge. A first-time offender facing the harshest available sentence while others with worse records walk free is experiencing the Benavides principle in action, even if no one names it.
Laws Broad Enough to Reach Almost Anyone
The maxim gets its bite from statutes written so broadly that a determined prosecutor can find a violation in almost any professional or political life. When most people are theoretically guilty of something, the power to choose whom to charge becomes the power to choose whom to punish.
- Mail and wire fraud, including honest services: Federal mail fraud carries up to 20 years in prison, and combined with the honest services doctrine it can reach public officials and corporate officers for depriving others of their “intangible right” to honest services. The vagueness of what counts as “honest services” gives prosecutors wide latitude to frame routine conduct as criminal.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 1341 – Frauds and Swindles
- False statements under 18 U.S.C. § 1001: Making a materially false statement to any federal official — during an interview, on a form, in an email — carries up to five years in prison. Because FBI interviews are often unrecorded, a disagreement about what was said can become a felony charge even when the underlying investigation leads nowhere.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 1001 – Statements or Entries Generally
- Tax evasion under 26 U.S.C. § 7201: Up to five years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 for individuals. The tax code is complex enough that aggressive enforcement can uncover technical violations in most people’s financial histories.
- Foreign Agents Registration Act: Willful failure to register carries up to five years in prison. For decades FARA was almost never criminally enforced, meaning countless lobbying and consulting arrangements operated without registration. Selectively reviving enforcement against particular individuals while ignoring widespread noncompliance is a textbook example of the friends-and-enemies pattern.
The common thread is serious prison time attached to conduct that many people engage in routinely without consequence. The written law is uniform. The enforcement never is.
How the System Shields Its Friends
The other half of the maxim — everything for friends — has its own set of formal mechanisms. Each one exists for legitimate reasons. Each one can also be applied selectively.
Non-Prosecution and Deferred Prosecution Agreements
A non-prosecution agreement lets a potential defendant avoid charges entirely in exchange for conditions like fines, factual admissions, or reforms. A deferred prosecution agreement files charges but holds them in abeyance while the defendant complies. Both are common in corporate cases, where the collateral damage of a conviction — lost jobs, destroyed pensions, stock collapse — gives prosecutors a reason to negotiate.
The Department of Justice provides federal prosecutors with formal guidance on when these agreements are appropriate, listing factors like the seriousness of the offense, the level of cooperation, and the impact on innocent employees.3United States Department of Justice. JM 9-28.000 Principles of Federal Prosecution of Business Organizations The factors are reasonable on paper. They also give prosecutors room to justify leniency for favored entities while pursuing the full weight of the law against others. When Boeing entered a deferred prosecution agreement worth approximately $2.5 billion to resolve fraud charges related to the 737 MAX, with no individual executives criminally prosecuted, it illustrated a category of outcome that a small business owner charged with the same type of fraud could never negotiate.
Executive Clemency
The presidential pardon power exists to correct injustices. It is also the most direct expression of the friends-and-enemies principle available in the American system. A pardon wipes away the legal consequences of a federal conviction, and no court reviews the decision. Collateral effects on voting rights and firearms ownership are more complicated than most people assume — voting rights for federal felons are governed by state law, and firearms restoration is a separate process — but the core power is unilateral.
Regulatory Leniency
Less visible than pardons and equally powerful, agencies can protect favored entities by simply not doing their jobs. When an agency declines to audit a company, ignores whistleblower complaints, or quietly drops an investigation, the practical effect resembles immunity, with no paper trail. Federal civil penalties vary widely by statute, with maximums ranging from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands per violation. A company that escapes those penalties through political connections gains a real advantage over competitors who spend money on compliance.
What the Constitution Says Against It
Equal Protection
The Fourteenth Amendment forbids any state from denying “any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”4Legal Information Institute. US Constitution Amendment XIV Courts enforce this through different levels of scrutiny. For most enforcement decisions, the government only needs to show its action is rationally related to a legitimate state interest, the lowest standard.5Constitution Annotated. Equal Protection and Rational Basis Review Generally When a classification involves race or national origin, scrutiny is much stricter. The practical result is that proving unequal enforcement violates the Constitution is relatively feasible when the targeting is based on race and extremely difficult when it’s based on political affiliation or personal grudges.
The Yick Wo Principle
The landmark case on unequal application of a neutral law is Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), where the Supreme Court struck down San Francisco’s enforcement of a laundry ordinance applied almost exclusively against Chinese business owners. The Court wrote that “though the law itself be fair on its face, and impartial in appearance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand … the denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the constitution.”6Legal Information Institute. Yick Wo v Hopkins, 118 US 356 (1886) That passage is essentially the judicial version of the Benavides maxim turned into a prohibition.
The Armstrong Barrier
Anyone trying to enforce that prohibition runs into United States v. Armstrong (1996). A defendant claiming selective prosecution must prove two things: that enforcement had a discriminatory effect, and that it was motivated by a discriminatory purpose.7Legal Information Institute. United States v Armstrong, 517 US 456 (1996) Discriminatory effect means showing that similarly situated people were not prosecuted for the same conduct. Discriminatory purpose means showing the prosecution was driven by hostility toward a protected characteristic or constitutionally protected activity.
Before a court will even allow the defendant to see the government’s files, they need “clear evidence” of both elements. Federal prosecutors enjoy a presumption that they’ve properly performed their duties, and courts have described this threshold as a “significant barrier” designed to prevent fishing expeditions.8Justia. United States v Armstrong, 517 US 456 (1996) You essentially need strong proof of selective prosecution before the court will help you gather proof of selective prosecution. The circularity is the point.
What a Targeted Person Can Do
If you believe a prosecution is retaliatory rather than principled, the legal system offers a few narrow paths. None of them is easy.
Vindictive Prosecution
Vindictive prosecution is a distinct concept from selective prosecution. It occurs when a prosecutor escalates charges in retaliation for a defendant exercising a legal right, such as demanding a trial or filing an appeal. If the defense shows that charges were increased after the defendant asserted a procedural right and the new charges carry greater punishment, courts may presume the escalation was retaliatory. The government then has to demonstrate a legitimate reason for the additional charges, such as new evidence. Timing matters: the presumption typically applies only after jeopardy attaches.
The Hyde Amendment
Federal defendants who are acquitted can seek to recover attorney fees and litigation costs if they can prove the government’s position was “vexatious, frivolous, or in bad faith.” Enacted in 1997, the Hyde Amendment remains the only federal mechanism for making a wrongfully targeted defendant financially whole. The burden falls entirely on the acquitted defendant to prove bad faith, which is a heavy lift because courts extend significant deference to charging decisions. Awards are paid from the budget of the prosecuting agency. The defendant must also have retained private counsel; those represented by public defenders are not eligible.
Public Records
The Freedom of Information Act allows any person to request records from federal executive branch agencies, operating on a presumption that government information is public unless it falls within one of nine exemptions.9FOIA.gov. Freedom of Information Act When enforcement patterns suggest bias, FOIA requests can surface internal communications that reveal whether targeting was deliberate. FOIA doesn’t reach Congress or the courts, and agencies often resist through delays and heavy redactions, but it is one of the few tools available for making selective enforcement visible enough to challenge.
Why the Maxim Endures
These remedies exist on paper. The honest assessment is that they rarely succeed. Armstrong is designed to be nearly insurmountable. Vindictive prosecution claims require clear evidence of retaliatory timing. Hyde Amendment awards are exceptionally rare. A system built on prosecutorial discretion has a permanent tension with equal treatment, and the legal tools for challenging abuse of that discretion are calibrated to protect the government’s authority to make charging decisions, not to second-guess them.
The Benavides maxim survives because it describes a vulnerability that constitutional safeguards can limit but not eliminate. So long as human beings decide who gets investigated and who gets ignored, the gap between law on the books and law in practice will remain the space where power operates.