Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Tuesday ordered the closure of the Venezuelan embassy in Ecuador in support of Mexico, thus severing all remaining diplomatic ties with Ecuador following its attack on the embassy from Mexico this month.
Maduro said he ordered all diplomatic personnel to return home “until international law is expressly restored”. Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa’s failure to express regret over the raid motivated the move, he said.
“I have ordered to close our embassy in Ecuador, close the consulate in Quito, immediately close the consulate in Guayaquil and for diplomatic personnel to return to Venezuela immediately… until international law is expressly restored in Ecuador“Maduro said during his participation in a virtual presidential summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), after Noboa broke his silence in an interview in which he said he believed he was “on the right side of history”.
close ally
Ecuador faced widespread criticism after its police stormed the embassy on April 5 to arrest Jorge Glas, a former vice president convicted of corruption who had been granted asylum by the Mexican government the day before.
After Mexico and Nicaragua, Venezuela It is the third country in the region to close its embassy in Quito due to the raid. Glas entered the Mexican embassy in December after prosecutors alleged his early release from prison was bought by a drug trafficker.
Glas served as vice president during the presidency of Rafael Correa, a close ally of Hugo Chávez and Maduro. Correa’s successor Lenín Moreno expelled Venezuela’s ambassador in 2018 when relations deteriorated, but he stopped short of cutting ties completely so that the nearly 450,000 Venezuelan immigrants in Ecuador could continue to have access to official documents.
The international crisis has improved Noboa’s standing among voters ahead of a key referendum scheduled for April 21.
Support at Celac
Mexico aspires for the thirty countries that make up CELAC to join the lawsuit it filed against Ecuador for the violent invasion of the Ecuadorian security forces into its embassy in Quito on April 5 to arrest former vice president Jorge Glas, who had taken refuge in the diplomatic compound and received asylum.
Mexico broke relations with Ecuador and last week denounced the Andean country before the International Court of Justice for acts that represented a “flagrant violation of inviolability” of its embassy and physical attacks against diplomats, as could be seen in videos from inside the building.
He also presented a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, to denounce the incident. The international community condemned and questioned this raid.
“Our approach is aimed at temporarily expelling (Ecuador from the UN) as long as there is no apology”, an acceptance that “they violated our sovereignty.”“said Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in his usual morning conference.
The second thing, that there is no repetition, “that any State that violates the sovereignty of an embassy… and the right of asylum, international law, be expelled from the UN”he added. “It was a very serious matter”.
Maduro was the first to make his support public at ECLAC. “Venezuela fully supports Mexico’s proposal to expel Ecuador from the United Nations until it apologizes to the international community and restores the situation to its original legal status. Former Vice President Jorge Glas must be restored to the Mexican embassy, recognized political asylum”.
Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena had announced that one of the objectives of Tuesday’s meeting was to gather support for the complaints.
The Ecuadorian justice system declared on Friday that the detention in the Mexican embassy of former Vice President Glas, convicted of two cases of corruption, was illegal, but ordered that he remain in prison because there is another order of deprivation of liberty against him for another pending case.
Noboa does not give in
The Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa He has not apologized to Mexico. “We are on the right side of history“, he said in an interview with the Australian channel SBS released on Monday in which he said he did not regret his decisions. “If someone enters an embassy and catches a criminal and the members of the embassy start beating the police, who started the violence?”
When asked about possible solutions, the Ecuadorian said that ““I would invite President Obrador to eat ceviche, we could eat some tacos together and talk.”
“The statements that President Noboa has given recently are more than an act of provocation against Mexico, it is an act of provocation against International Law and absolute contempt for the entire legal framework.“Maduro said in CELAC.
The diplomatic tension between Mexico and Ecuador had begun before the raid on the embassy, when López Obrador weeks ago questioned the elections that brought Noboa to power.
With information from Bloomberg and AP
Source: Gestion
Ricardo is a renowned author and journalist, known for his exceptional writing on top-news stories. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he is known for his ability to deliver breaking news and insightful analysis on the most pressing issues of the day.
