After former vice president Jorge Glas was removed from the Mexican Embassy and taken into custody by Ecuadorean officials on Friday night, Mexico decided to sever ties with Ecuador.
The 54-year-old Glas, who has been found guilty of corruption twice, had been locked up in the Quito embassy since December, when he requested political asylum, which Mexico had earlier on Friday granted.
The arrest was made after police broke into Mexico’s embassy in Quito, according to a tweet made by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Twitter.
Glas served as vice president of Rafael Correa’s Marxist administration from 2013 to 2017, and the president’s office of Ecuador announced in a statement that Glas had been arrested.
Glas’s international lawyer, Sonia Vera, stated over the phone that his team was putting in a request for assistance with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on an inter-American basis as well as with the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly.
The former vice president was escorted to the judges court in the city of Andes, where there was a strong military presence.
The arrest brings an end to a week of growing hostilities between Ecuador and Mexico. On Thursday, Ecuador proclaimed Mexico’s ambassador persona non grata in Quito, citing the leftist President Lopez Obrador’s “unfortunate” remarks.
“Having misused the immunities and privileges afforded to the diplomatic mission that housed the former vice president and granted diplomatic asylum contrary to the usual legal framework,” the presidency of Ecuador charged in a statement.
Calling the arrest a “authoritarian” act that violated both Mexican sovereignty and international law, López Obrador announced that he had given the order to Alicia Barcena, the foreign minister of Mexico, to sever diplomatic ties with Ecuador.
Shortly afterward, on Saturday, Barcena declared the “immediate” suspension of diplomatic relations with the South American country, later adding that embassy workers would return to Mexico.
Ecuadorean officials had applied to Mexico for authorization to enter the embassy and take Glas into custody. Glas was found guilty in 2017 of accepting bribes from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht in exchange for government contracts, and he was given a six-year prison sentence.
Glas, whose political membership is being used as a pretext for persecution, has a preventive arrest order out for him related to another corruption investigation. The Ecuadorian government refutes these claims.
Lopez Obrador’s remarks this week on the violent elections that occurred in Ecuador last year—which included the assassination of a presidential candidate—infuriated Ecuadorean officials.
Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa took office late last year and quickly faced an escalating conflict with drug gangs, which prompted him to declare a nationwide state of emergency early this year, which he extended last month.
(Reuters)
