Mexico City. Former Ecuadorian vice president Jorge Glas launched a call for help to the leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil to intercede on his behalf, after being arrested in a police assault on the Mexican embassy in Quito on April 5.
“I am in the worst prison in Ecuador and on a hunger strike. Help me,” Glas wrote to the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in a manuscript dated April 15 and known to AFP this Thursday.
The former official, who is convicted of corruption, is in a high-security prison in Guayaquil (southwest).
The armed raid to capture him led Mexico to break relations with Ecuador and file a lawsuit before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Quito considers the political asylum granted to Glas one day before the police operation illegal, alleging that this figure excludes common crimes.
But the Mexican government considers that there are signs of political persecution against the former number two in the government of socialist President Rafael Correa (2007-2017), who took refuge in the embassy last December when he was on conditional release.
Glas, 54, also thanks López Obrador for the asylum and asks him for “forgiveness as an Ecuadorian” for breaking into the diplomatic headquarters.
“Here there is a brutal persecution against all progressives. Only international help can do something,” the former vice president stressed in letters addressed to López Obrador and the presidents of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
In his message to Petro and Lula, also dated April 15, Glas also states that he was taken from the embassy with “torture.”
A video from inside the building, attached by Mexico to its lawsuit, shows the agents carrying Glas apparently handcuffed, and also when Mexican diplomat Roberto Canseco is dragged by the neck.
Petro had previously announced that he would ask the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) for precautionary measures in favor of Glas, who had to be hospitalized between April 8 and 9 for refusing to receive food in prison, according to Ecuadorian authorities.
The former vice president took refuge in the embassy after the court issued an arrest warrant against him for another alleged case of corruption.
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– 2024-04-24 07:04:52
