Ecuador tears up the diplomatic rule book
Mexico has severed diplomatic ties with Ecuador after police stormed the Mexican embassy to arrest Ecuador’s former vicepresident, Jorge Glas, who has been living there since seeking political asylum in December, says The Guardian. Glas, who served around half of an eightyear sentence on charges of bribery and corruption before being released early in 2022, remains under investigation for other alleged crimes. Under the Vienna Convention, the raid, which injured an unspecified number of personnel, constitutes an intrusion onto Mexican sovereign territory. Such violations are very rare.
Ecuadorian “president-cumstrongman” Daniel Noboa knew there would be “international blowback”, but is gambling that the raid will benefit him at home, says Joe Daniels in the Financial Times. His war on drug traffickers has been very popular, despite leading to a “wave of violence”, and he justified the raid as part of that war on the basis that Glas was only released early because a “drug trafficker bribed a judge”. While most analysts agree that the episode is unlikely to escalate, it will have raised doubts about Noboa’s impulsiveness. A general election is due to be held in Ecuador next February.
Although there is “some basis” to Ecuador’s claim that Glas, as a “convicted felon”, cannot be granted political asylum, it is up to Mexico, as the asylum-granting state, to decide whether the case against Glas is “politically motivated”, says Jonathan Este in The Conversation. There is a “long history” of Latin American politicians spending years holed up in embassies because the asylum-granting state refuses to grant them safe passage out of the country. If the “takeaway” from Ecuador’s raid is that the “protection of diplomatic premises can be secondary to whatever is politically expedient on any given day”, it will make international diplomacy, for which there is a growing need, much harder.