Orlando Perez
Special FOR The Day
La Jornada Newspaper
Saturday, November 23, 2024, p. 20
Quito. Following the explanation this Friday by President Claudia Sheinbaum about the arrest of Walter Solís, former Minister of Transportation and Public Works of Ecuador, and an alleged participation of the Ecuadorian government, the authorities in Quito remained silent on the matter.
However, both Solís’ lawyers and several sources close to the former minister, who is a refugee in Mexico, express their suspicions that this action does not respond to the normal and traditional procedures for a person who has the guarantee of non-refoulement. to the requesting country.
It was the Federal Ministerial Police that went to Solís’ home in Mexico City and the agents took him to Terminal 1 of the Benito Juárez international airport, which is why the family and friends of the former Ecuadorian official could not help but be astonished given his refugee status. Lawyer Miguel Olmedo’s doubt is how a federal judge could issue an extradition order. In his opinion, there would be been crazy take it taking into account the state of relations between Ecuador and Mexico, much more so when the Ecuadorian president is on trial for the assault on the embassy last April.
The same Thursday, immediately after the retention, The Day He tried to establish contact with Solís and one of his relatives not only confirmed his situation, but also warned that he would be –whenever– being put on a plane and taken, via Panama, to Guayaquil. However, minutes later, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that the former Ecuadorian official regained his freedom and maintains his asylum status in accordance with the Law on Refugees, Complementary Protection and Political Asylum, as the Mexican president reiterated yesterday.
Likewise, Sheinbaum said that to his knowledge, there is no basis to indicate that the Ecuadorian government coordinated with corrupt offices of the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) to take him to Ecuador, thus violating legal processes and his status as a political refugee.
The former official who has taken refuge in Mexico since 2021 is prosecuted for the Manabí Reconstruction case, along with the former vice president of Ecuador, Jorge Glas, who had sought asylum in the Mexican embassy in Quito, until it was attacked by orders of the Ecuadorian president.
When consulted, lawyers Olmedo and Moisés Montiel indicated that thanks to the intervention of the Foreign Ministry, their client was released, after they showed the refuge agreement to the FGR personnel who carried out his arrest for the purposes of extradition to Ecuador. The arrest warrant was granted by a judge at the South Prison.
In a document spread on social networks, the version that Interpol had issued a red card and requested to capture Solís since January of this year was also discarded.
When consulting the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry about this matter, there was no official response, since since there are no diplomatic relations between the two countries, according to a source, there is no reason to explain what is not among their institutional tasks.