Mexico is breaking diplomatic ties with Ecuador after police raided its embassy in Quito to arrest former Ecuadorian Vice President Jorge Glas.
Confirming the move in a statement to newspaper, a foreign ministry spokesperson said that all Mexican diplomatic staff would leave Ecuador immediately.
Ecuadorian police stormed the Mexican embassy in Ecuador’s capital Quito on Friday night to arrest the former vice president, who is seeking asylum there, an escalation of tensions that Mexico decried as “an outrage against international law.”
Video from the scene showed police officers massing around the embassy, some armed. Embassies are generally considered as protected spaces under diplomatic norms.
Glas has since been transferred to the Guayas No. 3 Deprivation of Liberation Center, a maximum-security prison in Guayaquil known as La Roca, the national prisons agency SNAI announced Saturday.
A rift between the two Latin American countries had been growing since Mexico’s decision to grant political asylum to Glas, vice president under leftist ex-President Rafael Correa between 2013 and 2017.
Convicted twice on corruption charges, Glas says he is the subject of political persecution and had been sheltering inside the embassy.
But on Friday, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, on his official X account, said he had been informed that “police from Ecuador forcibly entered” the Mexican embassy and took Glas – who “was a refugee and processing asylum because of the persecution and harassment he faces.”
A statement released by Ecuador’s government on X also confirmed the arrest
