The Argentine government denied on Thursday any responsibility in the escape of a former Ecuadorian minister convicted of corruption from his embassy in Quito and considered that the case does not affect the “brotherly” relations between the two countries.
“How are you going to favor the transfer? Please!”, responded the spokesperson for the Argentine presidency, Gabriela Cerruti, when asked about the former high Ecuadorian official María Ángeles Duarte, who last Friday left the residence of the Argentine ambassador, where she had taken refuge in 2020, and traveled to Venezuela.
“The Argentine government has nothing to do with security issues in Ecuador, how it happened is beyond us,” said the Argentine official.
Ecuador, through its foreign minister Juan Carlos Holguín, expressed that there was “complicity” of the Argentine diplomatic representation in the flight of Duarte and declared ambassador Gabriel Fuks persona non grata. Buenos Aires, in turn, responded with a request for the Ecuadorian diplomat Xavier Monge to leave Argentina.
Diplomatic relations remained at the level of charge d’affaires.
“Relations with Ecuador are not suffering any type of conflict,” Cerruti said despite the tension between the two South American nations. “This situation is specific and has nothing to do with relations between the two countries, which we all know are relations of closeness and brotherhood.”
Duarte entered the Argentine ambassador’s residence in August 2020 to avoid serving an eight-year prison sentence after being convicted of being part of an organization that investigators say collected some $7.3 million in bribes from construction contractors. Public Works. She entered that residence accompanied by a minor son, whose father is Argentine. She was taken in for humanitarian reasons, as reported at the time.
Argentina reported in December that it granted her asylum for humanitarian reasons and that it hoped to receive a safe-conduct from the Ecuadorian government for the former minister to travel to the airport, which neutralized the arrest warrant against her. But that did not happen and she remained in the ambassador’s residence, in the north of Quito.
Cerruti explained that “the issue had already been unresolved for a while. The Argentine Foreign Ministry had acted before international organizations such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, it had asked the Ecuadorian government to resolve this situation.
The Argentine Foreign Ministry reported Tuesday in a statement that Duarte had appeared before its embassy in Caracas. He explained that he made inquiries about Argentine documentation procedures, but clarified that the former official stated that he has no intention of traveling to Argentina “in the short term.”
“It is a matter of discussion with the beloved Ecuadorian nation that hopefully it will pass quickly and we can find a solution,” spokeswoman Cerruti concluded.
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