The police assault perpetrated last Friday night against the Mexican Embassy in Quito seriously hits the international credibility of Ecuador and its president, Daniel Noboa. The irruption of the agents, masked and in armored cars, into the diplomatic legation to capture the former Ecuadorian vice president Jorge Glas, who has taken refuge inside, flagrantly violates the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, which enshrines the inviolability of embassies. The fact that Glas, who held the vice presidency with Rafael Correa and Lenín Moreno, has a prison order and has received two sentences for corruption – of which he has served five years – in no way alters respect for this norm. The Vienna Convention itself establishes that no State may invoke rules of domestic law to breach the treaty. A basic and universally respected principle that Noboa, in a decision that has received international condemnation, blew up knowing that Mexico would break relations.
It is to be hoped that, after the damage caused, the crisis does not get worse. The president of Mexico himself, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has called for calm and has asked to avoid falling into any provocation. But the history of this nonsense, unfortunately, shows that each bad step can lead to a worse one. Since Jorge Glas took refuge in the embassy on December 17, claiming to be subject to judicial persecution (correism considers him a political victim), both countries have been on a collision course. A tension that accelerated this week after, in controversial statements, López Obrador implied that the assassination of the Ecuadorian candidate Fernando Villavicencio had facilitated Noboa's victory in the presidential elections last October. The Government of Quito responded by declaring the Mexican ambassador persona non grata. Immediately afterwards, Mexico granted political asylum status to Glas. But Noboa's Executive refused to let him leave, arguing that this asylum was illegal, given that the former vice president still had to respond to Ecuadorian justice for common crimes.
So much for a bitter conflict that Daniel Noboa was responsible for raising to unsustainable limits by violently assaulting the embassy, trampling on the right to asylum and capturing Glas. A performance that places the Ecuadorian president, eager for popularity, in the sphere of leaders such as the Salvadoran Nayib Bukele, characterized by constant violations of human rights in his fight against crime.
That the president of Ecuador becomes an emulator of his counterpart from El Salvador and even surpasses him, shows the dangerous expansion of authoritarian impulses throughout America. Faced with these attitudes, it is urgent to defend the basic norms of international coexistence. Rape of him only creates even grimmer scenarios. Noboa must not forget that the harm caused to his country is much greater than the supposed political benefit that his decision could have provided. That must be the starting point for a necessary and desirable return to normality.
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