Ecuador’s ex-vice president Jorge Glas, whose capture in a raid on Mexico’s embassy in Quito sparked an outcry, returned to a maximum security prison on Tuesday after a short hospitalization.
Glas, 54, was admitted to hospital on Monday after refusing to eat for 24 hours in the Guayaquil maximum security prison where he has been held since being seized in a dramatic raid on the Mexican embassy.
The former vice president “has just entered the Center for Deprivation of Liberty,” the SNAI prisons authority reported, after earlier saying his health had returned to “acceptable parameters.”
Ecuador security forces stormed the embassy on Friday night, a rare incursion on what is considered inviolable diplomatic territory, to arrest Glas, who had been granted asylum by Mexico.
Glas — who already served time on corruption charges — was the subject of a fresh arrest warrant for allegedly diverting funds that were intended for reconstruction efforts after a devastating earthquake in 2016.
The intrusion triggered a political storm, with Mexico, several other Latin American states, Spain, the European Union and the UN chief condemning it as a violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention governing international relations.
Mexico, which cut diplomatic relations and pulled its diplomatic personnel from Ecuador, said it was filing a complaint at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Glas was vice president under former leftist president Rafael Correa, who has been exiled in Belgium since 2017 and was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison for corruption.
A Brussels-based lawyer for Glas told AFP on Monday that she feared for his life and pleaded for international help.
“I believe that Jorge Glas is at grave risk, at imminent risk, in the hands of the (Ecuadoran) government. It was a kidnapping, and I believe at any moment they could kill him,” Sonia Vera said.
