05-06-08APR24- #Ecuador "The 2024 raid on the Mexico’s Embassy in Ecuador has captured the worlds attention. Daniel Noboa defended the entry of the police into the Mexican embassy in Ecuador: “Justice is not negotiated”.
The Ecuadorian president said he had ordered it “to protect national security,” and to prevent “sentenced criminals” from fleeing as had “happened before.” Two convictions, two ongoing criminal cases, two irregular releases, a truncated asylum and a recapture in the midst of a diplomatic crisis.
Jorge Glas served as vicepresident under presidents Rafael Correa, entered the Mexican embassy in Quito to request asylum, alleging political persecution. Glas had been sentenced in December 2017 to serve eight years in prison for two sentences: one of six years for illicit association and another of eight years for bribery.
Jorge Glass was arrested at the embassy on the night of April 5, 2024, where he had taken refuge since December 17, 2023. He sought refuge there four days after the Prosecutor's Office uncovered the case Metastasis.
The decision by Ecuador’s incumbent conservative president, Daniel Noboa, to order the Friday night raid on Mexico’s embassy, which was painted as part of his nascent “war on crime”, prompted a torrent of criticism from across the political spectrum in Latin America.
Noboa ordered the Ecuadorian police to enter the Mexican embassy because he had information that Jorge Glas was going to escape. This was confirmed by the Ecuadorian Foreign Minister, Gabriela Sommerfeld, who said that president Noboa had information that Glas was going to escape that night. Since Mexico granted him asylum, hours before the raid on the embassy, and after López Obrador's statements about sending a military plane to pick up the Mexican ambassador Raquel Serur, who was expelled from Ecuador, speculation began about an operation for the former vicepresident to leave with the Mexican authorities.
Speculation was based on the escape of María de los Ángeles Duarte, a former minister of Correism and a fugitive who was sheltered in the Argentine Embassy in Quito and who escaped in March 2023. Although the case was not clarified, the then Ecuadorian legislators indicated that Duarte would have left the Argentine diplomatic headquarters in an accredited mission vehicle. These vehicles cannot be searched by the host country's police.
The raid to the Mexican Embassy —which occurred after a period of rising tensions between Mexico and Ecuador, was carried out to arrest Jorge Glas, who had been sentenced for corruption and had been living in the embassy since December 2023. Just a few hours before the raid, the former vicepresidente had been granted political asylum. The assault led to Mexico severing its relations with Ecuador. The following day, Nicaragua followed suit in solidarity with Mexico.
“It was an authoritarian act … not even the fearful [Chilean dictator Augusto] Pinochet and others had been so bold,” the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, told reporters on Monday.
Ecuador continues to be in the eye of the hurricane after having raided the Mexican Embassy in Quito to capture Jorge Glas, the former vice president convicted and investigated for corruption. While the international community condemns Ecuador's action, which violates the Vienna Convention on diplomatic headquarters, the Ecuadorian authorities indicate that it was the Mexican government that first violated the Caracas Convention by granting asylum to a person convicted of common crimes and that the statements by the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, were clear interference in domestic affairs.
Ecuador’s highly controversial decision to arrest Glas, which was condemned from Brasília to Brussels, was widely seen as a flagrant violation of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations under which embassy premises are considered “inviolable”.
President Daniel Noboa issued a statement on Monday afternoon in which he sought to justify his actions to the international community. The 36-year-old politician claimed he had “taken exceptional decisions in order to protect national security, the rule of law and the dignity of a people who will not tolerate any kind of impunity for criminals, crooks, corrupt people or narco-terrorists”.
“Ecuador is a country of peace and justice, which respects all nations and international law,” the president said.
Mexico Embassy in Ecuador faced armed raid-
Ecuadorean police and soldiers forced their way into Mexico's embassy in Quito late Friday night, April 5th, to arrest former vicepresident Jorge Glas, who had for months taken refuge in the embassy, after Mexican officials offered him formal asylum protection earlier in the day.
The raid to the Mexican Embassy —which occurred after a period of rising tensions between Mexico and Ecuador, was carried out to arrest Jorge Glas, who had been sentenced for corruption and had been living in the embassy since December 2023. Just a few hours before the attack, the former vicepresidente had been granted political asylum. The assault led to Mexico severing its relations with Ecuador. The following day, Nicaragua followed suit in solidarity with Mexico.
Jorge Glas was sent to the Alcatraz-inspired prison La Roca (the Rock) in Guayaquil on Saturday, one day after being detained by Ecuadorian security forces inside the Mexico’s embassy in Quito during the raid that drew outrage across Latin America and the world.
🙌 Latest News: Jorge Glas has been taken to the naval hospital from the maximum security prison three days after the politician was captured inside Mexico’s embassy in Quito during a police raid that drew outrage across Latin America.
In a statement, Glas’s lawyer, Andrés Villegas Pico, said he had been told by the prison warden that his client had been found “unawakened” in his cell at 8.30am today Monday April 8th.
“Security personnel claimed Glas had not wanted to eat food for the whole of Sunday … it is assumed he took an overdose of medication in order to sleep,” Villegas added.
His lawyer said he had “no further details of what happened, of his medical progress, or a clear diagnosis”, adding: “His life is in danger.”
Ecuador’s prison authority claimed that, after refusing prison food for 24 hours, Glas had suffered a “possible imbalance” and been taken to hospital by paramedics. His condition was stable and he would remain under observation, it said on Monday afternoon.
Jorge Glas: The political career of former Vice President of Ecuador Jorge Glas Espinel - the man at the center of Mexico's rupture in relations with Quito - is closely associated with one name: that of former President Rafael Correa.
Since his first official position in 2007 as head of the Solidarity Fund of Correa's first administration, Glas - 54 years old and an engineer by profession - began a meteoric career within the government and the former president's circles, which led him to accompany him in the presidential formula in the 2013 campaign.
But it was also with his incursion as Correa's vice that his problems with justice began.
After four years in office, in December 2017 Glas was sentenced to eight years in prison for receiving bribes from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, in a case that hit several governments in Latin America.
This is how the legal reality of former Vice President Jorge Glas is summarized in the last six years.
Metastasis case
Based on the chats found on the phones that drug trafficker Leandro Norero used from the Latacunga Prison, the Prosecutor's Office has prosecuted 52 people for organized crime. He has identified them as part of a structure that sought impunity through irregular judicial rulings.
Although Glas was not one of Norero's direct contacts, he was one of his topics of conversation. Regarding the former vicepresident, Norero spoke with businessman Xavier Jordán, Daniel Salcedo, prosecuted in several cases for corruption, and with his lawyers. And according to a protected witness who gave early testimony, the boss even had video calls with former president Rafael Correa to talk about Glas's freedom. Although Jorge Glas has not been linked to the Metastasis case or its derivatives -Purga y Plaga-, everything indicates that he was another of the beneficiaries of judicial corruption and that his interests were mixed with those of drug trafficking, with whose leaders, he even shared lawyers.
Odebrecht: The beginning of the end for Glas
Glas's judicial path began in 2017. The politician had been re-elected as vice president of the Republic, but this time he was no longer accompanying Correa. The new President was Lenín Moreno.
In the midst of the change of Government, the Odebrecht case had exploded in the world and in Latin America. The Brazilian construction company admitted to having managed an entire structure of paying bribes in exchange for benefits in several countries. In Ecuador, the company said it had paid more than USD 35 million.
In August of that year, after the collaboration of Odebrecht executives with the United States justice system, dozens of documents and audios were leaked around the world. In one of those recordings, the interlocutors were José Conceiçao Santos, representative of the construction company in Ecuador, and Carlos Pólit, then Comptroller and who is now a fugitive. Pólit will be tried for money laundering in the United States.
In that dialogue, Pólit and Santos said that "Glas was making money, asking for money" for the 2017 presidential campaign. In addition, files from Ricardo Rivera, Glas's uncle, revealed that they received bribes from Odebrecht under the pseudonym 'Glass'.
Moreno removed his support from Glas. "Unfortunately, the finger is increasingly pointing towards you ," he told her, days before taking away his duties as vice president. That was the beginning of the rupture between Moreno and Correa and the end of Alianza PAIS, the political movement with which they had won the elections.
In October 2017, still serving as vice president, Glas turned himself in. After three months in prison, his definitive absence from office was confirmed, which ended in his dismissal from office. He was prosecuted for conspiracy and received a six-year prison sentence.
Bribes: Glas and Correa entangled
While in prison and with Moreno in power, Jorge Glas's legal situation worsened dramatically. In 2019, a journalistic portal led by the murdered former presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, revealed what was initially known as the Arroz Verde case.
It was a group of files, called "green", in which the alleged collection of bribes from at least a dozen national and international companies by the Government of Correa and Glas was revealed, which would have served to finance the political campaigns of Alianza PAIS.
The Prosecutor's Office renamed the case Bribes 2012 and 2016 and, with the collaboration of Pamela Martínez, Correa's former advisor, reconstructed the story. In the process, the public ministry proved that Correismo set up an office parallel to the Presidency of the Republic, in which bribes were collected, managed and distributed.
Correa, Glas, Fernando Alvarado, Alexis Mera, María de Los Ángeles Duarte, Walter Solís and other Correismo officials were sentenced to eight years in prison. Correa is a fugitive, while for Glas a new debate began about whether his sentences of eight and six years were added or the older one absorbed the younger.
Singue, penalties, liberations and pre-freedom
Glas was the subject of another criminal process, the so-called Singue case. The Prosecutor's Office argued that as Minister of Strategic Sectors, the former official would have made possible the awarding of the Singue oil field to an international consortium.
According to the Prosecutor's Office, based on a report from the Comptroller's Office, this negotiation was irregular and caused millions in damages against the Ecuadorian State. In the first instance, Glas and two former Correismo ministers were sentenced to eight years in prison, in January 2021.
Precisely, the first attempts by Glas and his defense to obtain his freedom began that year. In November 2021 and January 2022, Glas filed an appeal for unification of sentences, but on both occasions it was denied because the sentence in the Singue case was involved.
Until, in April 2022, a judge in Manglaralto, a rural area of Santa Elena, ordered Glas' immediate release through a habeas corpus. Guillermo Lasso's government released the former vicepresident, but appealed that decision.
A month later, the Court of Santa Elena annulled that decision and dismissed Judge Diego Moscoso, since he had acted illegally in the Glas case. And the former official turned himself in again.
He returned to prison, but his attempts did not stop there. In August 2022, Judge Banny Molina of Manabí - in a strange legal move - extended the benefit of a habeas corpus for a prisoner with illnesses and ordered the release of Glas and Daniel Salcedo, sentenced for hospital corruption and now prosecuted by the Metastasis case.
In Norero 's chats it is evident that both the drug trafficker and his partner Jordán had an interest in that release. They were talking about repaying Glas for the favor when he is president. However, Lasso's government refused to release them, until the decision was revoked and Molina was dismissed and sentenced for malfeasance.
In November 2022, a ruling favored Glas: a Court of the National Court of Justice (CNJ) declared the annulment of the Singue case and annulled that ruling. The judges considered that the Comptroller's report, on which the case was based, had expired and the process should be restarted.
Given the annulment of his third sentence, Glas and his lawyers reactivated their requests for the eight-year sentence to absorb the six-year sentence and for Glas to access the benefit of pre-release. He presented several habeas corpus and precautionary measures, but was unable to get out of jail.
Until at the end of 2022, Emerson Curipallo, judge of Santo Domingo, once again favored Glas, granting him a precautionary measure. He ordered his provisional release, until the request for pre-release, which was unfinished, is processed.
Curipallo has already lost his status as a judge and is now being prosecuted for the Metastasis case, since he would have received bribes from Leandro Norero in exchange for the release of two of his trusted hitmen: 'Madrid' and 'Cuyuyuy'.
In those cases, both Jorge Glas and Norero were represented by Christian Romero and his circle of lawyers , among whom Jonathan Aguinda and Hugo Lara stand out. Now Romero and Lara are prosecuted for Metastasis and Plague.
The new arrest warrants
While on provisional release, Glas and his lawyers took the opportunity to advance the pre-release process. The first step was the calculation of the sentence: in January 2023, the court decided that Glas should serve only 8 of the 14 years that he had in sentences.
Until that moment, he had already been in prison for a little more than 5 years; For his lawyers, he qualified to opt for the benefit of pre-release.
However, the shadow of a new case arrived. The Prosecutor's Office announced its intention to prosecute Glas for embezzlement, due to alleged irregularities in the reconstruction works of Manabí, after the April 2016 earthquake.
While pre-release was being processed, Glas' lawyers made several moves to delay the new formulation of charges.
On the verge of being prosecuted in a new case and pending the resolution of pre-release, on December 18, 2023 - four days after the discovery of Metastasis - Jorge Glas took refuge in the Mexican Embassy and requested asylum.
Ten days later, on December 18, 2023, the court finally denied the request for pre-release and Glas had to return to prison and serve the almost three years he had left in prison.
Furthermore, on January 5, 2024, his prosecution for the reconstruction of Manabí was completed and in that case he was also sentenced to preventive detention.
Now, after his new capture and detention in La Roca de Guayaquil, Glas must face that case for embezzlement, serve his sentence for bribery and illicit association. And expose himself to new processes for his links to Norero and his corruption network, or for the alleged harassment of his former assistant.
Mexico breaking diplomatic ties with Ecuador | Political undertones
Jorge Glas, member of the group of Correísta militants, received political asylum from Mexican President Andrés López Obrador, regardless of the pending issues with the Ecuadorian justice system and four days after the Prosecutor's Office uncovered the Metastasis case.
On 3 April 2024, the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, alluded in a press conference to the fact that Luisa González, the presidential candidate of the pro-Correa Citizen Revolution Movement, had an advantage in polling for the 2023 Ecuadorian general election, but that after the murder of Fernando Villavicencio her polling numbers had dropped, implying the assassination had affected the election results.
After the president's comments, on 4 April, Mexican ambassador Raquel Serur Smeke was declared a persona non grata and the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry invoked the principle of "non-intervention" in the internal affairs of another country and article 9 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to request her departure.
The Mexican government granted political asylum to Glas after the expulsion of its ambassador. Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa reiterated that he would not issue the necessary safe conduct for Glas to leave the country.
On 5 April, the Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Alicia Bárcena, called for the Government of Ecuador to arrange safe passage as soon as possible so that Glas could leave for Mexico.
Ecuador argued it was unlawful to grant asylum to Glas, who had been convicted twice on graft charges.
Glas, who had a preventive arrest warrant out on another corruption case, had been holed up in the embassy in Quito since seeking political asylum in December.
At the Mexican capital's main airport, Foreign Minister Alicia Barcena hailed the solidarity shown with Mexico from 18 Latin American governments - nearly the entire region and spanning its ideological divides - in addition to 10 European nations, plus the United States and Canada.
While welcoming about a couple dozen embassy personnel who were flown back to Mexico, the diplomat also lashed out at Ecuador's "physical aggression" on the embassy. She also reiterated plans to seek further international rebukes for the government of President Daniel Noboa over the incident.
Mexico's ambassador to Ecuador, Raquel Serur, standing next to Barcena at the ceremony, made the following statement:
"President Noboa made a mistake by taking a decision that didn't just break with all established international conventions, but it also showed ignorance of the reality of his country," said Serur, adding that the president "doesn't understand" that individuals can be provided with asylum protections without judging their innocence or guilt.
These are the Jorge Glas earrings:
Odebrech and Bribery
Jorge Glas was sentenced on December 13, 2017 to six years in prison for illicit association in the Odebrecht case, and eight years for bribery in the Bribery case. Both sentences were combined, so Glas had to remain in prison for eight years.
In December 2022 he was released from prison thanks to a provisional precautionary measure, until his pre-release is processed. But, in December 2023, justice denied him that pre-release. Therefore, Glas must return to prison since he has only served five years and two months in prison.
Glas and the Reconstruction of Manabí
In January 2024, Glas was prosecuted for embezzlement within the Manabí Reconstruction case. A judge issued preventive detention, which could not be carried out because the former vice president was already taking refuge in the Mexican embassy in Quito.
Metastasis and Purge
Jorge Glas is singled out by the Prosecutor’s Office for his links with those involved in the Metastasis and Purge cases, which revolves around public officials and justice operators who have favored drug trafficking and corruption.
For example, Emerson Curipallo, Criminal Guarantees Judge of Santo Domingo, was in charge of a dozen cases related to drug trafficking and was the one who issued the release ticket in favor of Glas, in November 2022.
Glas and the harassment of a former assistant
Currently, the legal process is underway for the lawsuit filed by Soledad Padilla, Jorgel Glas’ former assistant, for alleged harassment.
According to the accusation, Glas had harassed Padilla verbally and psychologically. Padilla was Glas’s personal assistant for 17 years and even provided services to him even though the former president had been convicted and taken to prison."
Sources:
https://www.primicias.ec/noticias/politica/jorge-glas-procesos-legales-carcel-maxima-seguridad/
https://www.ecuadortimes.net/these-are-the-pending-cases-of-jorge-glas-with-the-ecuadorian-justice-system/
https://www.infobae.com/america/america-latina/2024/04/08/daniel-noboa-ordeno-a-la-policia-de-ecuador-ingresar-a-la-embajada-de-mexico-porque-tenia-la-informacion-de-que-jorge-glas-iba-a-fugarse/
https://www.infobae.com/america/america-latina/2024/04/08/daniel-noboa-defendio-el-ingreso-de-la-policia-a-la-embajada-de-mexico-en-ecuador-la-justicia-no-se-negocia/
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexico-will-not-retaliate-after-ecuador-expels-ambassador-president-says-2024-04-05/
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexico-welcomes-home-ecuador-embassy-staff-after-armed-raid-2024-04-07/
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/crg4gjnp22eo.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68748011.amp
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/08/ecuadors-arrested-former-vice-president-taken-to-hospital
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