(Mexico City) Former Ecuadorian Vice President Jorge Glas, arrested by police in the Mexican embassy in Quito on April 5 and detained, appealed for help to Mexico, Colombia and Brazil .
“I am in the worst prison in Ecuador and on hunger strike. Help me,” Mr. Glas wrote in a handwritten letter dated April 15 addressed to Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, a copy of which AFP obtained on Thursday.
“Here there is a brutal persecution against all progressives. Only international aid can do something,” underlined the former vice-president in his letter, also sent to the presidents of Colombia Gustavo Petro and of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The former vice-president of left-wing leader Rafael Correa (2007-2017), convicted of corruption, is in a high-security prison in Guayaquil (southwest of Ecuador).
Mexico severed diplomatic ties with Ecuador after a police assault on its embassy sparked an international outcry.
He also filed a complaint before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to assert the inviolability of diplomatic representations, established by the 1961 Vienna Convention.
For its part, Ecuador and its young right-wing president Daniel Noboa consider “unlawful” the political asylum granted by Mexico to Jorge Glas, who took refuge on December 17 in the Mexican embassy in Quito before justice does not comment on an ongoing case of embezzlement.
Jorge Glas was sentenced in 2017 to eight years in prison for participating in the corruption system of the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht and released in 2022 thanks to a legal appeal.
Ecuador’s National Court of Justice (CNJ), which last week ruled his arrest “illegal and arbitrary”, however, ruled that Mr. Glas must serve previous convictions in two other corruption cases.
The police raid on the Mexican embassy was condemned by several left-wing governments in Latin America, from Brazil to Venezuela (which closed its diplomatic representations in Ecuador), via Chile, but also by Argentina. ultraliberal President Javier Milei, as well as by the Organization of American States, the European Union, Spain and the United States.