The Mexican Foreign Ministry has released additional footage of the police raid inside the embassy where one can see the diplomatic staff being mishandled and Glas being forcibly taken outside. Rafael Correa is claiming that phones belonging to the former vice-president were also illegally seized by the Ecuadorian police.
https://twitter.com/SRE_mx/status/1777729695720620369Such video will not help Ecuador in the case Mexico has announced it will file before the International Court of Justice. It has already led a stronger rebuke from the United States than the first one and the passage in the OAS of a resolution condemning the action of Ecuador. Strong probability that Ecuador will lose the case before the ICJ and been sentenced to the payment of financial penalties, but such process will be very slow. Ecuador is accustomed to lose cases before international and foreign courts, in particular in
disputes with multinational companies or in
human rights violations cases.
Sanctions could happen earlier however as Mexico has definitely a bigger influence inside Latin American organizations than Ecuador. Suspension of Ecuador from the CELAC and Mercosur (as an associated member) have been mentioned and the accession of the country to the Pacific Alliance will be indefinitely frozen. The already complicated negotiations for the signature of a free trade agreement between Mexico and Ecuador are also jeopardized.
The rupture with Mexico is the acme of the particularly disastrous diplomacy of Daniel Noboa, marked by amateurism and inconsistency as illustrated by the decision
to assign the estranged Trumpist vice president in Tel Aviv to head a fictitious peace mission in Israel as a way to get rid of a political rival or the vacancies in key diplomatic jobs (no titular ambassador in Washington since two months and no one in Mexico since October).
The spat with Mexico started earlier this month when AMLO made outrageous comments about the assassination of Fernando Villavicencio (hinting the candidate was assassinated to prevent a victory of Correa’s candidate in the 2023 presidential election), comments that led Ecuador to order
the departure of the Mexican ambassador. It was shortly thereafter followed by the announcement that Glas (who took refuge in the embassy in last December) would be granted political asylum in Mexico, a decision the Noboa administration has denounced as an abuse of right to asylum and as an infringement on the sovereignty of Ecuador. According to the Ecuadorian government, the police intervened to prevent the imminent flight of Glas out of the country, similar to the March 2023
flight of María de los Ángeles Duarte (a minister under Correa sentenced from corruption) from the Argentinian embassy where she was housed since 2020 to Venezuela, a flight thought to have been helped by Argentina.
Already sentenced in two corruption cases (kickbacks received from Odebrecht and illegal financing of election campaigns), Glas was about to be indicted in another one (embezzlement in the reconstruction of Manabí province after an earthquake) when he took refuge in the Mexican embassy. Glas is also the subject of
a complaint for harassment filed by a former close adviser and could be indicted in additional corruption cases like
corrupt oil contracts mentioned during secretly recorded 2014 meeting between the then-vice-president and a high official. In short, there is little doubt about the fact that Glas is a criminal who had embezzled lot of public money under Correa.
More importantly, Glas is now also suspected to have obtain his conditional release (he abused to flee to the Mexican embassy) through the intervention of now deceased drug lord who bribed judges in order to get the former vice-president out of prison (part of various very suspicious conditional release decisions awarded to imprisoned drug traffickers). On last month, a witness into a protection program
testified during a pre-trial examination that, when sharing a cell with the drug lord in 2022, this one had phone conversations with Correa himself to discuss the release from prison of Glas.
Whether the accusation is true (there is mounting evidence about ties between narcos and Ecuadorian politicians, including Correa’s party), this is mattering in a context where fight against drug gangs and their allies inside the state apparatus has became the main declared priority of the Noboa administration and as a referendum is to be held on 21 April to approve, among other things (including, ironically, the recognition of international arbitration as a way to settle disputes in economic and trade disputes), an increase of the powers of the army, police and justice in matter of fight against criminality and the enabling of extradition of nationals prosecuted for organized criminality by foreign courts (currently prohibited by the Constitution).
The raid on the embassy has been motivated by internal political and electoral concerns and is enabling Noboa to reassert his posture as a tough-on-crime strongman which has been undermined in recent weeks by an upsurge in criminality. It rises also strong concerns about an authoritarian drift of the president who is planning to run for a full presidential term in next February.
There is a precedent in Ecuadorian history when a president decided to blatantly violate international laws in order to win a power-grabbing referendum. In September 2008, few days before a referendum to approve a new constitution, Correa triggered a major diplomatic crisis with Brazil when he
ordered the military to seize the assets of Odebrecht and expelled the company from the country. The expulsion was decided after revelations about the corruption practices of Odebrecht and the discovery of technical defects in a dam it delivered to the Ecuadorian government. Odebrecht was however enabled to return in Ecuador in 2010, presumably because Ecuador would have lost the case before an international court and couldn’t afford to alienate the Brazilian regional power. Odebrecht resumed its corruption practices, leading to the 2018 sentencing of Glas for corruption and to
the current trial in Miami of the then-comptroller general, accused of having written off penalties against Odebrecht in 2010 in exchange of bribes subsequently laundered in Florida.
Finally, while the raid on the Mexican embassy have been publicly (and more or less strongly) criticized by the vast majority of the countries of the region (from Venezuela to Argentina), the government of El Salvador
has remained silent on the matter and abstained in the vote by the OAS of a resolution condemning the Ecuadorian government. Noboa has made no mystery about his security police being inspired by Nayib Bukele. It is possible that once you have decided it is totally OK to ignore international standards in justice (arbitrary detentions, mass incarceration, permanent state of emergency, mass trials) to crack down on criminals, the next step is to totally disregard elementary diplomatic conventions?
In short:
* the raid against the embassy is indefensible
* fight against criminality shouldn't justify such abuses
* the right of asylum has been diverted to ensure impunity for corrupt politicians
* the main victims will be again Ecuadorian people, in particular the ones trying to enter the United States by crossing the Mexican border
* a long way to go before Latin American integration
