The arrest in the Mexican embassy of former Ecuadorian vice president Jorge Glas has caused one of the biggest diplomatic crises in Latin America. A long list of international leaders have shown their rejection of the Quito police’s raid on the headquarters of Mexican diplomacy in the country to arrest Glas, who had resided there since December and who had been granted political asylum a few hours before. his capture. The raid has led the Government of Mexico to break diplomatic relations with Ecuador.
But why is Glas’s arrest so important for Daniel Noboa’s Executive to fail to comply with its international obligations? Firstly, Jorge Glas was one of the strong men of the Government during the presidential term of Rafael Correa (2007-2017), and since he left office, he has spent most of his time deprived of liberty as he has been involved in convictions and corruption accusations. Accusations that he assures are based on political persecution and an instrumentalization of justice.
Secondly, the raid on the diplomatic legation occurred at a time of maximum tension between the governments of Mexico and Ecuador. Shortly before, the Ecuadorian Executive had decided to expel the Mexican ambassador, Raquel Serur, due to statements by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in which he linked the murder of candidate Fernando Villavicencio with the electoral victory of Noboa, who won in October last year. second round for Correísta candidate Luisa González.
Glas is currently accused of alleged embezzlement (embezzlement of public funds) in the ‘Reconstruction’ case of the coastal province of Manabí, the most affected by the strong earthquake that occurred in 2016. A judge ordered his arrest and entry into preventive detention after to stay at the Mexican Embassy.
The former Ecuadorian vice president is 54 years old and is an electronic engineer. His friendship with former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa dates back to their youth, when both participated in a group of ‘boy scouts’ in the port city of Guayaquil, where they are from.
He was part of the Correa Government from the beginning, as president of the Solidarity Fund (2007-2009), and then as minister of Telecommunications and Information Society (2009-2010) and minister of coordinators of Strategic Sectors (2010-2012). In addition, together with Correa, he formed the electoral duo of candidates for president and vice president of the ruling political party Alianza País for the 2013 elections. And, after the electoral victory, he completed four years in office (2013-2017) and then repeated victory with Lenín Moreno in 2017.
However, Moreno soon removed Glas from all his duties when complaints and indications of corruption against him began to accumulate. In September 2017, the vice president entered preventive detention and was removed from office.
The judicial processes continued their course in the following years while he remained in prison and accumulated up to three convictions, although one of them was later annulled. The first dates back to the end of 2017, when the court sentenced him to six years in prison for illicit association in the Odebrecht case. Likewise, in 2020 he was sentenced to eight years in prison for bribery in the ‘Bribery’ case, the Alianza País irregular financing scheme in which Correa, who, like Glas, claims to be a victim of lawfare, was also convicted and disqualified. In his case, he has refugee status from Belgium.
In 2021, Glas was also sentenced to another eight years in prison for embezzlement for the ‘Singue’ case, regarding the conditions for awarding contracts for this oil block. During his time in prison he always tried to find a way to be released by alleging a delicate health condition and danger to his life, as the prison crisis in Ecuador worsened, with frequent massacres between rival criminal gangs that control internally. the prisons. Thus, he managed to temporarily leave prison for 40 days in April 2022, thanks to a controversial judicial resolution that was later annulled.
At the end of that same year, another judicial resolution ordered his release again as a precautionary measure until the justice system decided whether he would be granted the benefit of pre-release, after having managed to combine the two sentences for the ‘Bribery’ and Odebrecht cases and having served the sentence. most of the eight years of deprivation of liberty. However, justice denied him that benefit, so he had to return to prison to serve that sentence.
However, another court ruling restored his political rights to be a candidate in the extraordinary elections of 2023, and in that context Glas was chosen in the first instance as Correismo’s presidential candidate for those elections but declined the candidacy due to the possibility that the resolution that allowed him to apply was annulled.
However, shortly after, at the end of that year, he was involved in a complaint for alleged intimidation by Soledad Padilla, a former advisor who had provided him with assistance during his time in prison and who, according to the complainant, suffered harassment for part of Glas when he supposedly did not see his interest in formalizing a relationship reciprocated and finding out that he had a romantic relationship with an assembly member of the Correismo parliamentary group.
Glas denounced Padilla for alleged extortion, stating that he had supposedly demanded that he receive $350,000 in exchange for not disseminating the recordings of some of their conversations that finally came to light.
