Mexico Breaks Off Relations With Ecuador After Embassy Raid

Ecuadorean police entered Mexican embassy in Quito to arrest former vice president who had been granted asylum.

Mexico’s leftist government cut diplomatic ties with Ecuador after Ecuadorean police raided its embassy in Quito to arrest a former vice president late Friday, the latest in a widening rift among Latin American leaders.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called the raid a “flagrant violation of international law and Mexican sovereignty,” and ordered a suspension of diplomatic relations.

A heavily armed Ecuadorean police squad forced its way into the embassy in Quito, the Ecuadorean capital, on Friday and arrested the former vice president, Jorge Glas, who had been granted political asylum by Mexico after claiming he was being persecuted politically. Police officers subdued Roberto Canseco, Mexico’s chargé de affaires, as special forces sought out and removed Glas.“They threw me on the floor,” Canseco told reporters after the former vice president was hauled off. “Like criminals, they raided the Mexican embassy in Ecuador. This isn’t possible, this can’t be. It’s crazy.”

On Saturday, Glas was expected to be transferred to a maximum-security prison known as “The Rock” in the coastal city of Guayaquil that has been used to hold violent drug bosses.

“No criminal can be considered to be politically persecuted,” the Ecuadorean government said in a statement Friday, in which it accused Mexico of abusing diplomatic…   immunity and privileges. “All embassies have only one purpose, to serve as a diplomatic space for relations between countries.”

Numerous political figures across Latin America, including those opposed to Mexico’s government, criticized Ecuador’s maneuver as a violation of diplomatic protocol. Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena said Mexico will take the incident to the United Nations International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Glas had been convicted of corruption in cases stemming from his time as vice president under former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, a leftist ally of López Obrador.

Ecuador declared Mexican Ambassador Raquel Serur persona non grata after López Obrador said during a press conference in recent days that the assassination of an Ecuadorean presidential candidate last year led to the election of President Daniel Noboa. Noboa was a little-known candidate in a campaign last year that was marred by the still-unresolved the assassination of another candidate, Fernando Villavicencio.