Mexico Breaks Diplomatic Ties With Ecuador After Arrest at Embassy

The Ecuadorean police on Friday night arrested a politician who had taken refuge in the Mexican Embassy in Quito, after what Mexico described as a forced entry that violated the country’s sovereignty.

The move was a rare instance of one government entering another’s embassy to make an arrest. The episode prompted Mexico to suspend diplomatic relations with Ecuador and inflamed tensions, which were already high between the two countries.

The politician, Jorge Glas, a former vice president of Ecuador, had been sentenced to prison for corruption, the country’s presidential office said in a statement, which added that there had been a warrant out for his arrest. Mr. Glas, who had been living at the embassy in Ecuador’s capital since December, was granted political asylum by Mexico earlier on Friday.

The office of Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, added that the arrest had gone forward because Mexico had abused the immunities and privileges granted to the diplomatic mission, and that Mr. Glas’s asylum was given “contrary to the conventional legal framework.”

Although it was difficult to immediately confirm exactly how the arrest happened, footage shared by Ecuadorean news outlets showed what appeared to be the aftermath: Police officers held back onlookers as two black cars, sirens blaring, drove out of the embassy. A man identified by local reporters as Roberto Canseco, the Mexican official in charge at the embassy, could be seen shouting, “No!” before officers pushed him to the ground.

Mr. Canseco told reporters that he was about to leave the embassy when, suddenly, he was faced with “police, thieves, who entered the embassy overnight.” He said he physically tried to stop them from entering. “They hit me, I was hit on the ground,” he said. “Like criminals, they broke into the Mexican Embassy in Ecuador.”

The arrest occurred after months of growing tensions between the two nations, in part over Mr. Glas, whom the Ecuadorean authorities consider a fugitive. Both sides have been trading barbs, which escalated this week after the Mexican president appeared to question the legitimacy of Ecuador’s most recent presidential election. The Ecuadorean government on Thursday effectively ordered Mexico’s ambassador to leave, declaring her a “persona non grata.” Mexico condemned that declaration on Friday and also granted Mr. Glas asylum.

Attacks on embassies carry particular weight because a 1961 treaty, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, allows them to be used as sanctuary. A host country’s police force cannot normally enter an embassy without the permission of its diplomatic staff.

There have been only a few cases in which governments have entered diplomatic premises without permission, said Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, the president of the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy organization based in the United States. “They have happened mainly in the context of military or authoritarian governments,” she said.

In this case, Ms. Jiménez Sandoval added, “Ecuador has truly crossed a red line by flagrantly violating international law.”

Diplomatic strains have grown across Latin America in recent months. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia has expelled Argentine diplomats — and then reinstated them — amid insults from President Javier Milei of Argentina. Mr. Milei has sparred frequently with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and the government of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

Shortly after the arrest of Mr. Glas, Mr. López Obrador issued a statement calling the episode a “flagrant violation of international law and the sovereignty of Mexico.” He added that the Ecuadorean police had used force to enter the embassy.

Mexico’s foreign affairs secretary, Alicia Bárcena Ibarra, said the country’s diplomatic personnel had sustained injuries in the altercation at the embassy, and that Mexico would file an appeal to the International Court of Justice.

The Ecuadorean Foreign Ministry said last month that it had requested Mexico’s permission to enter the embassy to arrest Mr. Glas.

On Saturday, the government of Nicaragua announced it was suspending its diplomatic relationship with Ecuador, characterizing the arrest as “neo-fascist political barbarity” in a statement shared by state-run media.

Mr. Glas, who served as vice president under President Rafael Correa from 2013 to 2017, had once been favored to succeed him. But in 2017, he was forced from office and found guilty of receiving bribes from Odebrecht, an international construction giant. In a far-reaching scandal that has implicated governments around Latin America with accusations of corruption, the company has admitted to paying some $800 million in bribes in more than a dozen countries. Mr. Glas was sentenced to six years in prison.

In 2020, he was embroiled in a separate high-profile bribery case, which also accused Mr. Correa of corruption. Both were convicted, and Mr. Glas was given an additional eight-year sentence. (Mr. Correa has been living in Belgium, where he said he has resisted extradition requests and been granted political asylum.)

In November 2022, Mr. Glas was released early from prison. Faced with a third charge of embezzlement, he asked for asylum from Mexico last December. Lawyers for Mr. Glas have claimed that he is being politically persecuted.

That charge led the Ecuadorean authorities to obtain the arrest warrant that prompted the confrontation at the Mexican Embassy on Friday.

The rift between the two countries widened a few days ago, when Mr. López Obrador made public comments about the 2023 assassination of Fernando Villavicencio, an Ecuadorean presidential candidate, and criticized Ecuador’s current president, Mr. Noboa.

Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday called Mr. López Obrador’s remarks “unfortunate” and announced the measures against the Mexican ambassador, Raquel Serur Smeke.

In response, Mexico instructed its ambassador to return home and appointed Mr. Canseco, the head of the Mexican consular section in Quito, to lead the embassy.

Mr. Noboa, a center-right political outsider, took office in November after winning a high-stakes election in which corruption and drug-related violence had been foremost issues. Mr. Noboa pledged to crack down on drug-trafficking gangs and return the nation to its prosperous past.

In recent years, Ecuador has been wracked by rising violence driven by powerful drug-trafficking gangs. Reports of car bombings and police assassinations have become common, and the assassination of Mr. Villavicencio, a presidential candidate who had been vocal about corruption and organized crime, created further upheaval.

Mr. Noboa declared a state of internal conflict this year, granting him special power to take on organized crime. He has deployed troops against the gangs and drawn comparisons to President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, who has cracked down on gangs in his country. In both countries, human rights activists have raised alarms about the potential for such aggressive tactics to infringe on civil liberties or the rule of law.

Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the decision to flout norms and arrest Mr. Glas in the Mexican Embassy raised larger questions that confront Ecuadoreans and others across Latin America.

“What do they prefer, a world without due process, guarantees and laws, but with strong governments that can seek so-called justice almost at any cost?" he said. “Or do you want a world where you have strong laws and protections for the suspects and ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ but sometimes those laws’ guarantees are inevitably abused to seek impunity?”

Gonzalo Ortiz Crespo, a former Ecuadorean diplomat, said in an interview that the decision by Mr. Noboa’s government to enter the embassy set a bad precedent for international relations.

But he added that given the conflict in Ecuador over serious corruption and crime, he supported the decision to arrest Mr. Glas. “Because it’s also a bad precedent to allow asylum to serve as protection for criminals,” he said.

Several nations, including Chile, with a leftist president, and Uruguay, with a center-right leader, condemned Ecuador’s action. So did the Organization of American States, which called for dialogue between the two nations and for them to renounce “the use of force to resolve conflicts.”

Mark A. Walsh and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting.