By Alexandra Valencia
QUITO (Reuters) -Former Ecuadorean Vice President Jorge Glas is back in prison in the city of Guayaquil after being discharged from the hospital and is in acceptable health, the SNAI prisons agency said on Tuesday.
Glas, already twice convicted of corruption and now facing fresh charges, was arrested on Friday after a raid by police on Mexico’s Quito embassy, where he had been living since December.
He was taken to a naval hospital on Monday, after the prison service said he refused to eat the food provided in jail.
SNAI confirmed in the late morning that Glas was back at the Guayas No. 3 prison.
“In accordance with evaluations carried out by the (hospital) personnel, the citizen is now presenting acceptable parameters of health, within normal range,” the SNAI said earlier in the day in a statement on X.
The SNAI added that Glas’ physical integrity will be protected.
Glas’ lawyers this week expressed alarm that he has been unable to speak to his legal team, which has repeatedly warned that the politician’s life could be in danger in prison.
“Yesterday they blocked my entrance to the naval hospital, which means that humane rules, international and national laws have been violated,” lawyer Eduardo Franco Loor told Reuters, adding that a motion for Glas’ release has been filed.
The unusual raid that led to Glas’ arrest escalated a simmering dispute between Ecuador and Mexico, prompting Mexico to suspend diplomatic relations with Ecuador and drawing criticism from countries around the region and elsewhere.
The Organization of American States’ secretary-general Luis Almagro said at a meeting on Tuesday the raid could not be justified by internal laws: “To accept it is to erase in a single stroke the most fundamental rule,” he said.
The arrest capped a week of growing tensions between the two Latin American countries, after Quito declared the Mexican ambassador persona non grata, citing “unfortunate” comments by leftist Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Ecuador’s government has said that it has evidence that Glas was planning to escape, though it has not provided details.
Video clips from inside the embassy broadcast during Lopez Obrador’s daily press conference on Tuesday showed a door violently forced open as well as a man, who appeared to be Glas, being carried out, his arms and legs hoisted up by police or soldiers.
The video also showed embassy staff attempting to block another door, but then being moved aside by armed Ecuadorean security officers.
“We can’t allow something like this to brushed away. We won’t keep quiet,” said Lopez Obrador, adding that the video will be used in Mexico’s request for the U.N. International Court of Justice to take up the case.
Leftist Glas, who was vice president from 2013 to 2017, was sentenced to six years in prison in 2017 for taking bribes from Brazilian construction company Odebrecht in return for state contracts.
He was convicted again in 2020 of using money from contractors to fund campaigns for ex-President Rafael Correa’s political movement, and given an eight-year sentence.
Glas served more than four years in prison before being released in 2022. He now faces charges of misusing reconstruction funds after a devastating 2016 earthquake.
Glas has long alleged that the charges against him are politically motivated, an accusation prosecutors have denied.
(Reporting by Alexandra Valencia in Quito; Additional reporting by Raul Cortes Fernandez and Sarah Morland in Mexico City; Writing by Julia Symmes Cobb; Editing by Matthew Lewis, Mark Porter and Deepa Babington)
