Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) announced on Friday evening that his country is severing diplomatic relations with Ecuador after its police stormed the Mexican Embassy to arrest a fugitive former Vice President who was sheltering there and was just granted asylum that same day. The Vienna Convention protects diplomatic facilities, which is why Mexico accused Ecuador of blatantly violating international law, but the sequence of events leading up to Friday’s drama isn’t widely known.
Former Vice President Jorge Glas alleges that the bribery and corruption charges that he’s facing are politically motivated revenge against the leftist government under which he served. Reuters reported in late December that “Glas, 54, was sentenced to six years in prison in 2017 after he was found guilty of receiving bribes from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht in exchange for awarding it government contracts.”
They added that “He was given a separate eight-year prison sentence in 2020, as was Correa, for using money from contractors to finance campaigns for Correa’s political movement. Glas has been jailed and freed repeatedly. He was last released in November 2022 after completing five years of his sentences. Though he can move freely within Ecuador, he cannot leave the country during the remainder of his sentences.”
Glas was ordered back to prison but fled to the Mexican Embassy on 17 December while appealing the decision. He didn’t receive asylum until Friday, the same day that the Ecuadoran police stormed that diplomatic facility to arrest him, which followed two significant developments over the past two days. AMLO opined on last year’s Ecuadoran elections on Wednesday in a way that newly elected President Daniel Noboa’s government interpreted as questioning its legitimacy.
It accordingly declared the Mexican Ambassador persona non grata the day later on Thursday, which preceded the decision to grant Glas asylum on Friday. The sequence of events shows that Mexico granted Glas asylum and requested his safe transit outside the country in line with international law after its top diplomat there was told to leave in protest of AMLO’s scandalous remarks. This was clearly intended to greatly up the ante of their dispute by throwing Ecuador into a dilemma.
AMLO was calculating that Noboa would be pressured by his country’s international legal commitments into letting Glas leave the country with the expelled Mexican Ambassador, but he overlooked several important facts that ultimately resulted in the failure of his plan. For starters, Ecuador is still close to the US despite its new leader reversing his prior decision to indirectly send old Russian arms to Ukraine after Moscow cut off profitable banana imports on epidemiological pretexts.
The US was also against the leftist government under which Glas previously served, with these two factors insulating Ecuador from American criticism. No punitive measures are therefore expected to follow from its top trade partner. While Mexico might move to curtail bilateral trade in response, the $818 million that it conducted with Ecuador last year was less than 1% of the latter’s 2022 GDP of $115 billion. By contrast, trade with the US was over 20 times more at $18 billion that year.
Money talks, regardless of however this observation makes one feel, and Ecuador simply makes more of it from the US than from Mexico. Whatever curtailment of trade with Mexico might follow this latest development could easily be replaced by the US so Ecuador won’t suffer from any de facto sanctions. Some of Mexico’s fellow leftist-aligned governments in the region might criticize Ecuador after what happened, but they’re also unlikely to voluntarily cede their market share there to the US or others.
China is Ecuador’s second-largest trade partner but it has a strict policy of not intervening in other countries’ affairs or foreign disputes between them unless it’s requested to mediate. This means that it also won’t voluntarily cede any market share there through the imposition of de facto sanctions over this violation of international law. Beijing knows that Washington would also spin this as meddling in order to smear the People’s Republic and would swiftly move to replace its share in the market as well.
Another factor that worked against AMLO’s calculations is that nobody sanctioned Israel after it bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus so there was never any realistic expectation that other countries would rally around Mexico if Ecuador crossed the diplomatic line in order to economically punish it. All that he was betting on was Noboa’s “goodwill”, which was a major mistake since that newly elected leader wasn’t going to let himself be humiliated by Mexico’s diplomatic escalation.
He won on a law-and-order platform and has been waging war against those drug gangs that unsuccessfully tried to seize control of the country in January. There was no way that Noboa could retain his image if he let a fugitive former Vice President leave the country to Mexico, let alone after being granted asylum one day after the Mexican Ambassador was expelled for AMLO’s scandalous remarks that questioned his government’s legitimacy. AMLO’s moves were serious provocations in his eyes.
In sum, Noboa chose to pursue domestic political goals that he regards as being in the country’s national interests at the expense of being accused of violating international law in furtherance of an alleged witch hunt against the former leftist government. If AMLO hadn’t granted Glas asylum, especially one day after his ambassador was expelled following what AMLO said about last year’s elections, then the police might not have stormed the embassy and Glas would have likely remained there indefinitely.
Drawing attention to the sequence of events leading up to Friday’s drama isn’t intended to imply support for Ecuador shredding the Vienna Convention but to enable observers to better understand its calculations. Noboa felt that failing to do so would have led to him “losing face” at home after AMLO greatly upped the ante of their dispute through his attempt throw Ecuador into a dilemma, thus leaving him little choice but to escalate in response after calculating that the tangible costs would be nil.
