Ecuador's invasion of the Mexican embassy has wider implications for Latin America

Apr 15, 2024

By Jeff Abbott

Mexico has severed diplomatic relations with Ecuador after heavily armed police raided the country’s embassy, in a direct violation of international norms. Late in the evening on April 7, police entered the Mexican embassy in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, to arrest former Ecuadorian Vice President Jorge Glas, who had requested political asylum in the embassy.

“No government has the right to enter an embassy in the way that occurred in Ecuador,” Mariana Aparicio, an expert on foreign relations and professor at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, or UNAM, tells The Progressive. “It seems to me that it is a very dangerous precedent, not only for the region, but for the world.”

. . .

Attacks on the sovereignty of embassies are rare across Latin America. The last major violations of an embassy’s sovereignty occurred in January 1980 in Guatemala, when the Central American country’s security forces assaulted and set fire to the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City.

At the time, farmers from the department of Quiche had occupied the embassy in protest of the massacre of Indigenous farmers in the highlands by the army as part of the counter-insurgency during Guatemala’s thirty-six-year-long internal armed conflict. The assault on the embassy left thirty-seven people dead, including the father of Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, Vincente Menchú.

In another instance, during the 1989 United States invasion of Panama, U.S. troops fired into the Vatican embassy compound in Panama City, shooting out the lights as they attempted to evict former president Manuel Noriega, who was seeking asylum there. They also skirted international law by blaring loud music in order to force him to surrender.

More:
https://cuencahighlife.com/ecuadors-invasion-of-the-mexican-embassy-has-wider-implications-for-latin-america/