The attack on the Mexican embassy in Quito is unprecedented opinion

he Attack on the Mexican embassy in Ecuador This is unprecedented in history. The institutional deterioration implied by this fact can be inferred from a few examples.

In 1956, Quaranta, then the intelligence chief of the Aramburu dictatorship, carried out the shooting rampage, attacking the Haitian embassy in Buenos Aires. They kidnapped those who saved them from being shot during the resistance uprisings. But Aramburu sent them back the next day to the same embassy. When Quaranta entered the Haitian embassy, ​​the ambassador, who was a poet, was not there, but his wife was there, whom he said was a dirty black woman. It was an event so serious that Aramburu, who was not known for respecting constitutional norms, decided to forcefully return those who had been kidnapped from there, illegally, the day before to the embassy. Even Aramburu thought it was “too much.”

Even Pinochet respected the right to asylum. In 1974 we were with Giuseppe Bettiol at the Criminal Law Congress in Santiago. We went to the Italian embassy. It was full of tents and tents in the park. The Italian ambassador had a contorted face and was desperate because he had to feed all these people. toThe worst dictatorships in Latin America have respected the right to diplomatic asylum. Pinochet never thought of entering the Italian embassy. Campora took refuge in the Mexican embassy in Argentina. But no one thought of attacking the Mexican embassy in our country. It's a line.

Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, APRA's founding lawyer, took refuge for four years in the Colombian embassy in Peru. They surrounded the embassy and its surrounding buildings. But they never attacked the Colombian embassy in Lima. Even the property surrounding the embassy declined in value. The Haya de la Torre case (Colombia v. Peru) is an asylum case brought to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in 1951 that Colombia was not obligated to hand over Haya de la Torre to the government of Peru.

The tradition of diplomatic asylum is one of the pillars of international law general. Embassies are foreign lands. They cannot be conquered by any excuse. Harald Edelstam, the Swedish ambassador to Nazi Germany, later sent to Pinochet's Chile, and known as Clavel Negro, saved hundreds of lives in Germany and in the Pinochet dictatorship, keeping them in the small dimensions of embassies. An award is given in his name and was received in 2016 in Stockholm by the son of diplomats Juan Guzmán Tapia, the judge who tried to try Pinochet.

The Ecuadorian court that just upheld the police storming of the Mexican embassy on illegal groundsThey beat the ambassador and kidnapped former Vice President Jorge Glas Integratedsuch as the Constitutional Court in Peru, which maintains an ominous silence regarding the existence of an unconstitutional vacancy, By sectors that openly make policy through their rulings. In one case, he was appointed by Lenin Moreno, himself accused of corruption, but free. In the second case, by members associated with Fujimori, who were in disagreement with “Professor” Castillo, the first rural chief in the history of the sister country.

Our judicial bodies do not act with any integrity. Supporting attacks on foreign embassies constitutes an attack on what little remains of international law, which is today in ruins around the world. Latin America should not be part of this general decline. The Ecuadorian government's decision to invade the Mexican Embassy is an extremely serious and unprecedented event in history. The Mexican government's position is neither “exaggerated” nor “intransigent” (and it cannot be solved with two glasses of tequila, as young Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, from a wealthy business family, and the youngest after Ecuador's first president, absurdly says. (He said after the break-up Gran Colombia) is the only country compatible with international law.