Ecuador was wrong to invade Mexico embassy, but we can’t ignore Cuba’s break-ins | Opinion

Ecuador’s April 5 police raid of the Mexican embassy in Quito to capture a former vice president convicted for massive corruption has triggered a wave of justified outrage across Latin America. But Mexico, Venezuela and other countries that are lashing out against Ecuador are not saying a word about similar violations committed by Cuba.

Mexico’s leftist populist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called the forcible entry by Ecuadorian police into the diplomatic mission “a flagrant violation of international law and the sovereignty of Mexico,” and has broken diplomatic ties with Ecuador.

Mexico argued, correctly, that the raid had violated the 1963 Vienna Convention, which establishes the “diplomatic immunity” of countries’ diplomatic missions. Ecuador’s right-of-center government had previously expelled Mexico’s ambassador, arguing that Mexico had intervened in its internal affairs, and illegally given asylum to a common criminal.

Lopez Obrador, days earlier, had questioned the legitimacy of President Daniel Noboa’s election, and had granted diplomatic asylum to former Vice President Jorge Glas, who had been convicted on corruption charges. Ecuador said Mexico’s asylum for Glas violated the Montevideo Convention of 1933 and the Caracas Convention of 1954, which prohibit countries from giving diplomatic asylum to common criminals.

Most Latin American countries condemned the break-in into the Mexican embassy. Among the most vocal critics of Ecuador was Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro, who claimed in an April 6 statement posted on X, formerly Twitter, that Ecuador’s incursion was “something that has never before been seen in Latin America.”

In reality, Ecuador’s invasion of Mexico’s embassy was far from unprecedented. Cuba, a close ally of Mexico and Venezuela, broke at least twice into foreign embassies in Havana, and with far more tragic consequences.

The Cuban dictatorship on Dec. 9, 1980, stormed into the Vatican embassy in search of people who had sought political asylum there. Three brothers aged 19 to 25 — Ventura, Cipriano and Eugenio Garcia Marin — were captured by Cuban troops inside the Vatican mission. They were executed three weeks later, according to the Cuba Archive, a U.S.-based research group.

On Feb. 21, 1981, Cuba’s special troops invaded the Ecuadorian embassy in Havana, where 15 members of a family had sought asylum. A 15-year-old boy arrested there, Juan Owen Delgado, died, a victim of police beatings, a few days later, the Cuban Archive reported, based on the victim’s relatives’ testimonies.

Cuba Archive’s executive director, Maria Werlaw, told me that at least five other Cubans have been murdered while trying to enter foreign diplomatic missions in Havana over the years, and at least 26 others were killed by Cuban troops while attempting to seek asylum at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo.

“It’s a big hypocrisy that Venezuela and Mexico are now saying that Ecuador’s incursion into the Mexico embassy was unprecedented in the region,” Werlaw told me. “They have selective political amnesia.”

Amazingly, Cuba’s dictatorship itself is now condemning Ecuador’s action, as if it never had done something similar. On Tuesday, Cuba requested an urgent meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, CELAC, to condemn Ecuador over the embassy break-in.

My impression is that the Mexico-Ecuador diplomatic spat is a tempest in a teapot that will end with a quiet re-establishment of relations once the incident fades from the headlines.

For the time being, though, the presidents of Mexico and Ecuador are both profiting politically from the incident. Lopez Obrador’s move to break diplomatic ties with Ecuador makes him look very tough at home, shortly before the June 2 elections in which he is supporting a loyalist candidate.

Noboa, who is casting himself as a crusader against corruption and drug violence, has seen his popularity surge since the incident at a time when he faces an April 21 referendum that could boost his re-election chances.

Neither Mexico nor Ecuador may be in a great hurry to solve this diplomatic conflict. Mexico, Venezuela and Cuba are exploiting Ecuador’s violation of the Vienna Convention to its fullest, while turning a blind eye on Mexico’s decision to give asylum to a convicted felon, and to Cuba’s much more brutal embassy attacks.

Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show on Sundays at 9 pm E.T. on CNN en Español. Blog: andresoppenheimer.com