The Government of the president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, achieved this Saturday its objective of returning Jorge Glas, former vice president of Rafael Correa, to prison, but at the cost of breaking diplomatic relations with Mexico and Nicaragua and receiving an almost unanimous condemnation from the international community for having invaded the Mexican Embassy to arrest him, when the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador had already granted him political asylum.
After having spent all morning in the Flagrancy Unit of Quito, Glas was transferred this Saturday by plane to the maximum security prison of La Roca, located in the prison complex of the city of Guayaquil and reserved for the most dangerous prisoners.
The former vice president was under an arrest warrant and placed in preventive detention in the case of the reconstruction of the coastal province of Manabí, the most affected by the strong earthquake of 2016, where he is accused of alleged embezzlement (embezzlement of public funds).
He also had to return to prison to finish serving an eight-year prison sentence for two convictions for bribery and illicit association after not receiving the prison benefit of pre-release, after having combined the two sentences and having served nearly five years in prison. , between 2017 and 2022.
Since mid-December 2023, he had stayed at the Mexican Embassy in Quito to request political asylum by declaring himself as politically persecuted and a victim of ‘lawfare’ (use of the judicial apparatus against political adversaries), which was granted to him on Friday.
Asylum to Glas was granted by Mexico at the moment of greatest tension in relations with Ecuador, after the Noboa Government expelled the ambassador, Raquel Serur, in response to statements by President López Obrador that linked the murder of the candidate presidential Fernando Villavicencio with the electoral victory of Noboa against the Correista candidate Luisa González.
A few hours later, the National Police of Ecuador broke into the Mexican Embassy to arrest Glas, in an act that the Mexican Government described as a violation of its sovereignty and international law, which is why it broke diplomatic relations with the Andean country. .
At the end of February, the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry had asked the Mexican ambassador for permission to enter the diplomatic headquarters to arrest Glas, but did not receive a positive response.
Both former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017) and his Citizen Revolution party have denounced that Glas was allegedly beaten during the hours he spent in detention and held the Government of President Daniel Noboa responsible for any impact on Glas’ physical and psychological health.
“The damage to the country’s reputation is immense, I think irreparable in the short term,” he said in a videoconference interview with EFE, where he noted that it is “technically a kidnapping in foreign territory” of a person who had been granted political asylum.
The Government of Ecuador, which had already anticipated that it would not grant safe passage for Glas to leave the country if asylum was granted, assured this Saturday that it knew about the risk of Glas’ imminent escape from the country, which is why He broke into the Embassy by force.
This was stated by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador, Gabriela Sommerfeld, in a press statement in which she insisted that her Government exhausted dialogue with the Mexican Executive before ordering the police raid on the Mexican Embassy in Quito.
It was known of “a real risk of imminent flight of the citizen required by justice”, which is why the Ecuadorian security force has acted to comply with a court order to capture Glas in a case of embezzlement, the chancellor added in her appearance. who did not accept questions from the press.
Sommerfeld insisted on the Ecuadorian Government’s position that “a criminal cannot be considered politically persecuted,” considering that this distorts the concept of asylum.
International reactions to the forced entry into the Mexican Embassy in Quito began to mount this Saturday, led by the OAS, which in a statement condemned the event.
In a statement, the OAS expressed its rejection of “any action that violates or puts at risk” the inviolability enjoyed by diplomatic missions and reiterated the “obligation” that all States have not to invoke norms of domestic law to justify the failure to comply with its international obligations.
In this context, the General Secretariat expressed its “solidarity with those who were victims of the inappropriate actions that affected the Mexican embassy in Ecuador.”
The Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, urged Mexico and Ecuador to “dialogue” and anticipated that he will request a meeting of the organization’s Permanent Council to address the tensions between both countries.
The US State Department condemned the violation of the Vienna Convention, which governs diplomatic relations, and urged Washington’s two allies to “resolve their differences in accordance with international standards.”
The Governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Venezuela also condemned the incident.
