The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, described this Saturday as a “fascist act” the police raid on the Mexican Embassy in Quito, where Ecuadorian security agents forcibly entered, on Friday night, to arrest former vice president Jorge Glas, that the Mexican Executive had granted political asylum.
“Venezuela raises its voice forcefully to reject this fascist act against international law and expresses its full and absolute solidarity with the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador,” indicated the Chavista leader through X.
This comment was made known minutes after the Venezuelan Government published a statement in which it repudiated the “excessive lack of modesty and common sense on the part of the Ecuadorian authorities.”
Jorge Glas, who was vice president of Ecuador during the mandate of former president Rafael Correa, faces several court cases in his country. Among them, his involvement in the Odebrecht case and the Bribery case stand out, for which he was sentenced to prison for illicit association and bribery respectively. Although Glas was released from prison in December 2022 under a provisional precautionary measure, in December 2023 he was denied pre-release and should return to prison. Furthermore, in January 2024, he was prosecuted for embezzlement within the Manabí Reconstruction case, but could not be arrested due to his refuge in the Mexican embassy in Quito.
“It is an act of barbarism, something never seen in Latin America, the right-wing pro-Yankee government of Ecuador brutally violated international law, assaulting the Mexican Embassy in Ecuador and kidnapping a political asylum seeker, thus recognized by the Mexican Government,” Maduro stressed.
Venezuela denounced that Ecuadorian police “illegally raided and captured former Vice President Jorge Glas, to whom the Mexican Government had granted political asylum, as a result of the atrocious persecution of which he has been a victim.”
“All of this constitutes an action that had not been recorded even in the most atrocious dictatorships in the region (…), creating a worrying precedent for Ecuador and the world,” Venezuela noted in its writing.
Ecuadorian police climbed the walls of the Mexican diplomatic headquarters to capture Glas, who has a preventive detention order for a case of alleged corruption in which he is currently being prosecuted, after having spent – between 2017 and 2022 – nearly five years in jail for two convictions for crimes that he rejects, considering himself a victim of political persecution.
Through social networks, López Obrador denounced “a flagrant violation of international law and the sovereignty of Mexico” and ordered to declare “the suspension of diplomatic relations with the Government of Ecuador.” EFE
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