Explainer – Why did Ecuador raid the Mexican embassy in Quito? Reuters
(Reuters) – Mexico abruptly suspended bilateral ties with Ecuador amid an escalating diplomatic dispute after Ecuadorian police forced their way into Mexico’s Quito embassy to arrest the former vice president on corruption charges.
Why did Ecuador enter the Mexican embassy?
Heavily armed and balaclava-clad police broke into the Mexican embassy late Friday night and arrested Ecuador’s former left-wing vice president, Jorge Glass, who was wanted on bribery charges.
Glass has been living at the embassy since December after seeking asylum in the North American country, which Mexico only granted Friday.
Ecuador, which requested permission to enter the Mexican embassy in early March to detain Glass, claims the asylum offer is unlawful. This is because under international law, those indicted should not be granted asylum.
Mexico, where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador immediately suspended relations with Ecuador after the raid, said it had looked into Glass’s case closely.
The arrests capped a week of heightened tensions between the two Latin American countries after Quito declared the Mexican ambassador persona non grata, citing “unfortunate” comments by leftist López Obrador.
Mexico’s president compared election-related violence in the two countries last year, claiming the killing of Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was unfairly linked to the leftist candidate who was later defeated. Lopez Obrador also accused the corrupt media of what he described as rigging the election.
The media has been a frequent target of Lopez Obrador’s anger during his nearly six years in office.
Who is JORGE GLAS and what is he accused of?
Glass, who served as vice president under Rafael Correa’s government from 2013 to 2017, has been convicted twice in corruption cases and is now facing new charges of misuse of public resources.
He was initially sentenced to six years in prison in late 2017 after a court found him guilty of taking bribes from Brazilian construction company Odebrecht in exchange for securing contracts for the scandal-ridden company.
Glas, 54, was convicted again in 2020 and sentenced to eight years in prison for using a contractor’s money to fund Correa’s political campaign.
Correa, who has been living in Belgium since leaving office, was also found guilty in the same case.
Both men have long claimed the charges were politically motivated, a claim prosecutors have denied.
Glas served more than four years in prison before being released in 2022, and was sent back to prison that same year. After the court ruled that he must serve the remainder of his sentence, his lawyers asked him to serve the sentences concurrently and receive the benefit of parole.
He was last released in November 2022, but Glas faces new charges alleging he misused funds raised to help rebuild the coastal Manabi province after a devastating earthquake in 2016.
His lawyers appealed the judge’s decision to send him back to prison last December, arguing his life was in danger, but their appeal was rejected.
What was the response by region?
On Saturday, governments across Latin America’s political spectrum, including Brazil and Colombia on the left and Argentina and Uruguay on the right, sharply condemned Glass’s arrest.
Brazil’s government condemned Ecuador’s actions as a “clear violation” of international norms banning raids on foreign embassies, while Argentina called on it to comply with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
What’s next?
Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it would file a complaint with the UN’s International Court of Justice, and the left-wing government of Colombian President Gustavo Petro said it would ask the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to protect Glass’s human rights. Asylum was “barbarically violated.”
The Washington-based Organization of American States said a meeting of its permanent council would be convened to discuss the need for strict compliance with international treaties.
