The Government gave a new position to the ambassador suspected of allowing an escape in Ecuador

When Ecuador's former Minister of Transport and Public Works, María de los Angeles Duarte Pesante, escaped in March from the Argentine embassy in Quito, where she had been a refugee since August 2020, the government of Guillermo Lasso became obsessed with the fact that Gabriel Fuks, the Argentine ambassador in Quito, had opened the doors to the woman.

And Lasso's now former foreign minister, Juan Carlos Holguin, began a crusade against Fuks, giving him 72 hours to leave the country. Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero acted with reciprocity and urged Lasso's ambassador, Xavier Monges, to leave Argentina, in an absurd crisis between Argentina and Ecuador, which still persists.

To vindicate Fuks, whom he supported from the first hour of the crisis, Cafiero appointed this Thursday night the leader of Buenos Aires Peronism as Undersecretary of Latin American Affairs of the Foreign Ministry, instead of Gustavo Martínez Pandiani, career ambassador, very close to Minister Sergio Massa and who nevertheless decided to go to a destination other than his specialty: the head of the embassy in Switzerland.

A statement on Friday reported that Fuks "presented his resignation to the President of the Nation, Alberto Fernández, to the position of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic in the Republic of Ecuador that was granted in the DCTO-2022-411-APN-PTE, of July 18, 2022."

Fuks, who was waiting for this appointment, wrote that he highlighted "the very broad support received both by you and by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship, Santiago Cafiero, during each and every one of the events that occurred during the events of public knowledge of the month of March 2023 and substitutes" and highlighted "all my activities and decisions were subject to Public International Law, and, more specifically, to the postulates of the Inter-American Convention on Diplomatic Asylum and to various items of the Vienna Convention."

This is not what Ecuador thought, because in addition, all of Argentina's movements were provocative. Let her enter the embassy while condemned to eight years of corruption, as well as her political boss, former President Rafael Correa, a friend of Vice President Cristina Kirchner, and President Alberto Fernández.

And then he escaped just one day that there was a reception at the residence. However, time would also demonstrate the clumsiness of the Lasso government, which also ended up appealing to the mechanism of dissolution of Parliament and resignation and call for elections to avoid impeachment.

The Ecuadorian government could never explain how Duarte Pesantes circumvented the various internal and external security mechanisms. How he crossed the borders to finally appear in Venezuela, where the first thing he did was visit Ambassador Oscar Laborde.

Duarte Pesantes, who in an interview he gave months later said it was "quite simple" to escape his country and absolved the Argentine government of blame.

Shortly after, the Court of Execution of the 2012-2016 Bribery case for which his conviction was reached ordered that the Central Bureau of Interpol of Ecuador alert the search to the central bureau of Interpol. The purpose is their location and arrest.