MEXICO CITY (AP) — President Nicolás Maduro ordered on Tuesday the closure of the Venezuelan embassy in Ecuador and the withdrawal of all its diplomatic personnel, in support of Mexico after the violation of its Mexican diplomatic headquarters in Quito.
Maduro, who also ordered to close the consulates in Quito and Guayaquil, showed his support for Mexico’s request for Ecuador to be suspended from the United Nations, during a virtual summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).
The Ecuadorian president, Daniel Noboa, was not present. Foreign Minister Gabriela Sommerfeld attended on behalf of Ecuador.
“Venezuela fully supports Mexico’s proposal to expel Ecuador from the United Nations Organization 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, recognize political asylum,” Maduro claimed.
The Venezuelan president criticized that Noboa was not at the meeting before the CELAC in which the issue that Maduro described as an “act of barbarism” was going to be addressed.
“President Daniel Noboa should have stood up today in front of all of Latin America and the Caribbean. He should have shown up and assumed responsibility for himself in front of Ecuador, in front of Latin America, in front of the Caribbean, in front of the world and he has not shown his face. I can say from Venezuela that he has gone into hiding and the people of Ecuador should know it.”
The Ecuadorian government did not issue any immediate reaction to what was discussed at the summit.
Mexico hopes that the thirty countries that make up CELAC join the lawsuit it filed against Ecuador for the violent invasion of the Ecuadorian security forces at its embassy in Quito on April 5 to arrest Glas, who has two convictions and An investigation was opened for corruption against him and he received asylum from Mexico one day before his arrest.
The tension between both countries began two days earlier with statements by the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, about the last elections in Ecuador in October, in which Noboa won.
At the same summit, the Bolivian president, Luis Arce, ratified his support for Mexico: “We are also going to accompany in the international spheres and in the judicial strata this demand that seems absolutely correct to us to establish a definitive precedent and that this does not happen again. never be repeated again.”
As a result of the invasion of the embassy, 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 the 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,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said then in his usual morning conference.
Maduro was the first to make his support public at ECLAC.
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 government has defended her actions, arguing that it was not going to allow “impunity” and that Glas was taking refuge in the Mexican embassy despite having criminal proceedings against him for common crimes.
The Ecuadorian justice system declared on Friday that his detention at the Mexican embassy was illegal, but ordered that he remain in prison because there is another order of deprivation of liberty against him for another pending case. He remains held in a maximum security prison in Guayaquil.
Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa 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, Noboa said that “I would invite President Obrador to eat a ceviche, we could eat some tacos together and talk.”
Maduro also referred to these comments before the CELAC countries: “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.”
The Venezuelan embassy in Quito was closed to the public since mid-morning, leaving around twenty people outside waiting for attention.
According to the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry, there are between 400,000 and 500,000 Venezuelans in the country, including those who are regularized. Large migratory flows from Venezuela have entered through dozens of irregular crossings between Colombia and Ecuador to evade immigration controls.
