27 a) the rule on exhaustion of domestic remedies is a means of defense established for the benefit of the States, and therefore the right to resort to it can be waived by them, even in an implied manner. Therefore, the State must “resort to it when admissibility is being studied, since not doing so is understood as a waiver of resorting to it later on” (principle of estoppel/forclusion); b) in the case under discussion, the State did not explicitly allege lack of exhaustion of domestic remedies during the early stages of the proceeding before the Commission; even though “it could have resorted to those arguments regarding admissibility of said complaint during the early stage of the proceeding before the Inter-American Commission,” in view of the fact that “the first notification of the complaint was toward the end of 1992, in other words, seven years before [the State resorted to this argument for the first time], and its first reply was in 1993.” Pursuant to the criteria set forth by the Court, preliminary objections, to be timely, must be raised from the start of the proceeding, that is, since the Inter-American Commission began to hear the complaint. If that is not the case, it can be assumed that there is an implicit waiver by the State regarding the possibility of raising preliminary objections. The opposite criterion would endanger correct administration of justice and juridical stability; c) the habeas corpus remedy -filed on July 20, 1992- was not effective either, and its execution was fraught with irregularities, in addition to the fact that “in the [current] procedural moment, said argument does not seek to solve the situation of abridgment [regarding the] extra-legal execution of Juan Humberto Sánchez;” d) the domestic proceeding in the instant case has suffered an unjustified delay of more than 10 years in the investigation, and this is one of the exceptions to the requirement of exhaustion of domestic remedies, set forth in Article 46(2) of the American Convention. In turn, “if processing of the domestic remedies is delayed with no justification, it can be inferred that they have lost their effectiveness to attain the result for which they were established, ‘thus placing the victim in a state of defenselessness,’” especially in light of the degree of complexity of the matter, the procedural activity of the interested party, and the behavior of the judicial authorities; and e) the State is mistaken in its determination of the adequate remedy, as it “is necessary both for the domestic remedies to formally exist and for them to be adequate to protect the juridical situation of infringement and to be effective to attain the result for which they were conceived.” In other words, the State cannot merely list the remedies that exist in domestic legislation, without demonstrating which would be adequate to protect the alleged situation of human rights violation. As regards the remedies of reconsideration and appeal, to which the State resorts in its argument, they are not remedies to be exhausted, “as they depend on a criminal investigation issuing a decision that is open to questioning by one of the parties.” In addition, with respect to the civil action mentioned by the State, it is not an adequate remedy “to obtain justice regarding the disappearance, torture, and subsequent death of Juan Humberto Sánchez.”