April 9, 2024 (EIRNS)—Former Ecuadorian Vice President Jorge Glas, who was violently kidnapped by police from the Mexican Embassy in Quito, where he had been granted asylum, was rushed to Ecuador’s naval hospital in Guayaquil yesterday after he was found unconscious in his cell at the maximum-security prison known as La Roca. It took President Daniel Noboa’s government several hours before issuing a statement saying that Glas had refused to eat prison food for the previous 24 hours, which caused an abrupt drop in blood pressure. He was seen by medical personnel at the hospital and returned to prison three hours later, Argentina’s daily Página 12 reported.
Some media circulated reports that Glas had tried to commit suicide with antidepressants and sedatives, but there is no confirmation that this was the case. Glas’s legal team issued a press release alerting the “national and international community” that their client’s human rights are being flagrantly violated and that “his life is in danger.” Prevented from seeing Glas at the hospital, his lawyer Vinicio Tapia warned that Glas had been kept incommunicado since his kidnapping on the evening of April 5, denied visits by his lawyers or his two children. In an interview with AFP, another lawyer, Sonia Vera, warned that Glas’s life is in “great danger in the hands of the state. I believe that at any moment they could kill him,” Página 12 reported her saying.
