Mexico Breaks Off Relations With Ecuador After Embassy Raid
Mexico Breaks Off Relations With Ecuador After Embassy Raid
"[President Noboa's] image has taken a huge and well-deserved hit," says AS/COA's Eric Farnsworth to The Wall Street Journal.
Mexico’s leftist government cut diplomatic ties with Ecuador after its conservative administration deployed police to raid the Mexican Embassy in Quito to arrest a former vice president late Friday, the latest in a widening rift among Latin American leaders.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called the raid a “flagrant violation of international law and Mexican sovereignty” and ordered a suspension of diplomatic relations.
A heavily armed Ecuadorean police squad forced its way into the embassy in Quito, the Ecuadorean capital, and arrested the former vice president, Jorge Glas, who had been granted political asylum by Mexico after claiming he was being persecuted politically.
Police officers subdued Roberto Canseco, Mexico’s chargé d’affaires, as special forces sought out and removed Glas. [...]
Eric Farnsworth, a former high-ranking State Department diplomat, said Ecuador’s raid will hurt President Daniel Noboa’s image abroad as he seeks international support for battling violent drug cartels and aims to boost trade to shore up a struggling economy.
“This is pretty bad,” said Farnsworth, currently vice president of the Council of the Americas policy group in Washington. “His image has taken a huge and well-deserved hit."
Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena said Mexico will take the incident to the United Nations International Criminal Court in The Hague.
