It seems that Ecuador is on a demolition path, since last Friday Ecuadorian police officers forcibly broke into the Mexican embassy in Quito to arrest former Ecuadorian vice president Jorge Glas, who was taking refuge in the Mexican diplomatic mission. Due to these events, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced the breaking of diplomatic relations with Ecuador, in the face of a clear and serious violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, particularly the principle of inviolability of embassies.
But it is not only the violation of the integrity of the Mexican embassy, but also the contempt for the Latin American custom of granting refuge or asylum to any person who needs it. There are many examples, and one of them is the case of Julián Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, who in 2012 took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London due to leaks of classified information, and was there for 7 years until 2019, when he was arrested by the London police inside the embassy, since the government of Ecuador, then under the regime of Lenin Moreno, withdrew his asylum status and authorized his arrest. But the fact that it took them so long to stop him is not because they lacked courage, but rather they understood the stupidity of breaking into an Embassy by force, and at all times the United Kingdom respected the Vienna Convention.
The immunity of diplomatic headquarters is a fundamental mechanism for peace, and its violation constitutes not only a transgression of the international order, but is also political folly. Noboa’s clumsiness is proverbial, since this is not an isolated event, he also had a very serious incident with Russia, due to the fact that he exchanged Russian weapons for American weapons with Washington, which caused diplomatic tension between Russia, and the latter prohibited the import of Ecuadorian banana.
The extraction may be a prelude to a state crime, as Glas was recently taken to a hospital for allegedly attempting suicide by overdose. The reality is that Ecuador is in the process of decomposition and not because of the supposed intervention of Mexico, but because of the bad decisions of its current government; These nonsense will undoubtedly have costs and will be recorded in the universal history of diplomatic clumsiness.
Regardless of the outcome, no one can put their hands in the fire for Glas, but even in the worst case scenario, an intervention could have been carried out without armed personnel; What did it cost the Ecuadorian police to wait for Glas to leave the embassy in a vehicle and arrest him? From being an issue that could have been local traffic, it escalated into a diplomatic conflict with consequences throughout Latin America. Shame will fall not on the people of Ecuador, but above all against the clumsy Noboa, who will be remembered as the Latin American Nero. XXX TWITTER @LuisH_Fernandez