World leaders, UN chief slam Ecuador over raid of Mexican embassy, arrest of former VP

Ecuador’s government is under fire over its decision to break into the Mexican Embassy in Quito to arrest its former vice president, Jorge Glas, late on Friday — just hours after Mexican authorities granted him political asylum.

The ongoing crisis, which has already led to the suspension of diplomatic ties between both Mexico and Nicaragua with Ecuador, began to unravel in the early hours of Saturday, following the raid of the embassy.

Glas, a controversial politician convicted in 2017 for taking bribes from a Brazilian construction company, had been sheltering at the embassy since December. He sought refuge there arguing he was being politically persecuted, following fresh accusations of corruption against him.

Mexican authorities granted Glas political asylum early Friday. Hours later, Ecuadorian special forces broke into the embassy and arrested him. They went into his room, “knocked him to the floor, kicked him in the head, in the spine, in the legs, the hands” and then “dragged him out,” when he could no longer walk, said his lawyer, Sonia Vera.

The shocking, highly unusual move has outraged world leaders on both sides of the political spectrum — from Argentina and Uruguay on the right to Brazil and Spain on the left — as well as the head of the United Nations.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres is “alarmed at the forced entry of Ecuadorean security forces into the premises of the Mexican Embassy in Quito,” his spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, said Saturday in a statement.

Guterres noted that failing to protect embassies from host-country interference jeopardizes “the pursuit of normal international relations, which are critical for the advancement of cooperation between states.”

Under the Vienna treaties, embassies and diplomatic premises are considered foreign soil and inviolable.

Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the move was a “flagrant violation of international law and the sovereignty of Mexico.”

The country, which plans to challenge the raid at the World Court in The Hague, immediately severed diplomatic ties with Ecuador.

Slamming the incident as “unusual and reprehensible,” Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega also cut ties with Quito, while Brazil’s foreign ministry expressed solidarity with Mexico and condemned the action as a “clear violation” of international norms.

The sentiment was echoed by Spanish authorities on Sunday.

“The entry by force into the Embassy of Mexico in Quito constitutes a violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations,” the country’s foreign ministry said in a statement.

Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa has yet to comment on the decision, but on Saturday, the country’s foreign minister, Gabriela Sommerfeld, defended the move saying Glas was at “imminent flight risk” and adding Quito had already exhausted diplomacy talks with Mexico City.