The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, announced the severing of diplomatic relations with Ecuador following a police action carried out on Friday night, in which Ecuadorian police invaded the Mexican embassy in Quito and arrested the former vice president Jorge Glas. He had been sheltering in the diplomatic representation since December last year and had just received political asylum. The information is from the newspaper The State of S.Paulo and the television channel CNN.
The head of the Chancellery and Political Affairs of the Mexican embassy, Roberto Canseco, in statements to journalists, denounced that Ecuadorian agents invaded and attacked the guards at the diplomatic headquarters. “This is totally unacceptable, it cannot be, it is barbaric,” said Canseco, adding that the agents attacked him when he confronted them to try to prevent them from violating the space of the Mexican Embassy in Quito.
A source close to the events told EFE that Glas was detained in the diplomatic unit and transferred to a Public Prosecutor’s Office unit in Quito. In the early hours of Saturday, Glas left in an armored vehicle and under strong security towards Quito airport, where he boarded an aircraft bound for Guayaquil, where the La Roca maximum security prison is located. The prison where Glas will be held was confirmed in a statement from the National Service for Comprehensive Care for Adults Deprived of Liberty (Snai), the State’s penitentiary agency.
Glas was vice-president in the administration of leftists Rafael Correa and Lenin Moreno, and was accused of embezzling public resources in the reconstruction of coastal cities affected by an earthquake in 2016. In addition to this case, he already had two judicial convictions, for illicit association and aggravated bribery, in 2017 and 2020; he served part of his sentence, but had been free due to a habeas corpus since the end of 2022. On that occasion, Glas’ lawyer had said that his client had no intention of fleeing the country, but in December 2023 he entered at the Mexican embassy in Quito and never left the place. In January of this year, an Ecuadorian court ordered Glas’ preventive detention in the case for which he was being investigated, but at that point he was already sheltered in the Mexican diplomatic representation.
The granting of asylum to Glas was yet another episode in a rapid deterioration in diplomatic tensions between Ecuador and Mexico. Days ago, López Obrador – who has a history of intemperate statements about non-leftist politicians, to the point of comparing the electoral success of Argentine Javier Milei to the rise of Nazism – had stated that the assassination of candidate Fernando Villavicencio had contributed to Daniel Noboa’s victory in last year’s Ecuadorian presidential elections by weakening leftist candidate Luísa González. In response, last Thursday the government of Ecuador declared how persona non grata the Mexican ambassador to the country, Raquel Serur, and ordered her expulsion from the country. The following day, the decision was made to grant political asylum to the former vice president.
As the columnist for People’s Gazette Filipe Figueiredo, embassies have inviolability guaranteed by international treaties – although they are not considered “territory” of the country represented, contrary to the widely propagated myth. Both Ecuador and Mexico are signatories to the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and Mexico had already denied, in March, a request from Ecuadorian authorities to enter the embassy and arrest Glas. The police invasion carried out without authorization on Friday night is, therefore, a direct violation of international law – which explains Mexico’s change in stance on breaking diplomatic relations, as until then López Obrador had been discarding the measure, even with the actions of the Ecuadorian government against the Mexican ambassador.