Ecuador's Foreign Ministry asked the Mexican Embassy in Quito for “consent so that law enforcement agencies can comply with the order of the National Court” and arrest Jorge Glas, the country's former vice president, who has been a guest for 74 days in this diplomatic mission. Mexico has not yet responded to the request of the Ecuadorian government, which recalled in a document that it had provided all information on the criminal proceedings against Glas. The former vice president appeared at diplomatic headquarters on December 17, 2023, expressing “fear for his safety and personal freedom.”
In front of the embassy, a group of police officers stands at the door and waits for instructions. According to the petition sent on February 29, the State Department has written at least six letters advocating that Glas's requested political asylum not be granted. For Ecuador, “the granting of diplomatic asylum under the provisions of Article III of the 1954 Convention on Diplomatic Asylum would not be lawful,” the document says. It points out that this measure cannot be granted to asylum seekers who are accused, prosecuted or convicted of ordinary crimes without having served the relevant sentence.
Jorge Glas was Rafael Correa's vice president and the winning pair with Lenin Moreno, who withdrew his support shortly after coming to power when he was accused of corruption in a criminal case in which Correa was also convicted. In January 2024, a judge requested that Glas be arrested as a defendant in a new case for the alleged crime of embezzlement. According to prosecutors, funds intended for the reconstruction of provinces devastated by the April 2016 earthquake, which left nearly 700 people dead and thousands affected, were diverted. At that time, Correa appointed Glas to head the Reconstruction Committee, which managed nearly $3 billion raised from taxes, loans and donations. To avoid prosecution in the case, the former vice president took refuge in Mexico's diplomatic headquarters, which is reviewing the official's asylum request.
Glas has already been sentenced to two prison terms, one for illicit association and another for bribery. Taken together, they add up to a sentence of 14 years that he had to serve in prison, only five of which he spent in Cotopaxi Prison. Since December 2022, he remains in conditional detention thanks to a precautionary measure taken by Judge Emerson Curipallo, who is imprisoned for his alleged involvement in a structure of corruption in the judicial system in the case described by the prosecutor as Metastasis.
On the same day that the Foreign Ministry formalized its request to enter the Mexican Embassy to arrest Glas, the Constitutional Court lifted the precautionary measures that granted conditional release to the former vice president and 22 others who benefited from these legal means . The judges consider them inadmissible because they aim to interrupt the effect of criminal sentences and unlawfully regain their freedom.
President Daniel Noboa and Chancellor Gabriela Sommerfeld have reiterated that they will not provide safe passage for Glas to leave the embassy, despite evidence in Ecuador that diplomatic channels are not always necessary. In March 2023, María de los Ángeles Duarte, who was convicted of corruption in the same Glass case, fled the Argentine embassy in a secret operation, which meant the severance of relations between the two countries. Now she is a refugee in Venezuela.
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