Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro said Tuesday he had ordered the closure of his country’s diplomatic missions in Ecuador after a raid on the Mexican embassy in Quito.
Maduro said he has ordered “diplomatic personnel to return to Venezuela immediately… until international law is restored in Ecuador.”
He was speaking during a virtual summit of CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, in which presidents from across the region are mulling possible sanctions against Ecuador.
Ecuadoran security forces stormed the Mexican embassy on April 5 to arrest former Ecuadoran vice president Jorge Glas, who is wanted on corruption charges and had been granted asylum by Mexico.
Maduro demanded that Glas be freed from the maximum-security prison where he is now being held and handed over to Mexico.
The rare incursion on diplomatic territory sparked an international outcry, and led Mexico to break ties with Ecuador, pulling its diplomats out of the country.
Mexico has filed a lawsuit against Ecuador at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, saying it wants the country suspended from the United Nations.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said the goal of the suit was “that this doesn’t repeat itself in any other country in the world, that international law is guaranteed.”
Several Latin American states, Spain, the European Union, United States and the UN chief have condemned the embassy intrusion as a violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention governing diplomatic relations.
Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa has defended the embassy raid as necessary to detain Glas because he posed a flight risk, saying he was willing to “resolve any difference” with Mexico, though an Ecuadoran court has since ruled the operation was “illegal and arbitrary.”
The high court ruling said the arrest was illegal since security forces had no warrant to enter the embassy. But the court added Glas would remain in a high security prison in the port of Guayaquil pending two other cases of corruption.
Glas, who served as vice president from 2013 to 2017, faces graft charges stemming from his time in office.
