• Ecuador
• Mexico
• Politics

Quito,(EFE).

Mexican diplomat Roberto Canseco was denounced in Ecuador for allegedly obstructing justice by trying to prevent the raid on the Mexican Embassy in Quito and the subsequent arrest of former Vice President Jorge Glas, Ecuador’s Attorney General said.

The attorney general added, however, that “since (Canseco) was part of a diplomatic mission, he enjoys diplomatic immunity – as dictated by international law – so the prosecutor’s office has no investigative power.”

“It has been ordered that, through the Directorate of International Affairs (of the Public Prosecutor’s Office), the notice of the crime should be brought to Mexico’s, as its appropriate,” added the Ecuadorian Public Prosecutor’s Office, which did not reveal who filed the complaint against the diplomat.

Canseco was the head of Mexico’s diplomatic mission in Ecuador after the ambassador, Raquel Serur, was expelled by the government of Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa.

Serur’s expulsion followed statements made by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador claiming that Noboa wouldn’t have won the presidency over Correista candidate Luisa González if it wasn’t for the murder of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.

Amid this diplomatic crisis, the Mexican government granted asylum to Glas, who had been in the Mexican embassy in Quito since Dec. 17, 2023, which led to the Ecuadorian police storming the diplomatic headquarters a few hours later to arrest the former vice president.

Glas had an arrest warrant and a pre-trial detention order, accused of allegedly embezzling public funds in the case of reconstruction work following the powerful 2016 earthquake.

He was also about to complete an eight-year prison sentence for two convictions for bribery and illicit association, after being released from prison in late 2022 thanks to a controversial judicial decision on precautionary measures.

Since his arrest, Glas has been held in La Roca, Ecuador’s maximum security prison in the coastal city of Guayaquil.

A tribunal of the National Court of Justice declared Glas’s detention illegal and arbitrary but kept the former vice president in prison because he had yet to serve time for previous sentences handed down in 2017 and 2020.

Glas, who was one of the strong men of Correa’s government (2007-2017) and even became vice president at the beginning of Lenín Moreno’s term (2017-2021), has always denied the accusations and charges against him, declaring himself a political persecutor and a victim of “lawfare” (the use of the judicial apparatus against political opponents).

The attack on the embassy on Apr. 5, led the Mexican government to break off relations with Ecuador and to denounce the Andean country before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, considering that it had violated international law and its sovereignty.

The Ecuadorian government, however, claims that Mexico was the first to violate international law by violating the Caracas Convention on Diplomatic Asylum, which prevents the granting of this status to people prosecuted in ordinary courts for common crimes.