Goodbye to the right of asylum?

As soon as I heard the news that the Ecuadorian police had brutally assaulted the Mexican Embassy in Quito, arresting former Vice President Jorge Glas, who enjoyed diplomatic asylum, I felt transported to that distant day, more than 50 years ago, when I myself managed to take refuge. in the Argentine Embassy in Santiago de Chile, the only option I had so that the Pinochet dictatorship would not kill me after the coup of September 1973.

Both I and Glas now and countless Latin Americans in the past were certain that those diplomatic compounds where we sought protection were inviolable, since they constituted the sacred territory of a sovereign country. The tradition that when a State persecuted an individual for political reasons it was possible to take refuge in a foreign legation had been established during the bloody 19th century of our continent, when elites who lost power due to civil wars or coups d'état armed that way to save your life. A practice respected by their victorious adversaries, who understood that tomorrow they were the ones who could find themselves knocking on the doors of an embassy to embark on their own exile.

Throughout the 20th century, this tradition was institutionalized in a series of agreements and laws, not only at the inter-American level (of the OAS in Caracas in 1954), but also in broader treaties (Vienna Convention of 1961). Those treaties had so much weight that even a regime like Pinochet's, which violated all the human rights of Chileans, disappearing, executing, torturing, harassing supporters of the overthrown President Allende, accepted those norms of international coexistence, despite which meant that his enemies could survive the coup and, one day, return to the country and lead the resistance.

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By the way, getting to an embassy like the Argentine one, avoiding the police patrolling the surroundings, was a feat. In fact, one afternoon, walking through the garden of that compound, a backpack and a sleeping bag fell at my feet, thrown from the other side of the wall, whose unfortunate owner was not able to get together with his belongings. I saw the fingers of both hands clinging to that wall, but only for a moment: a succession of shots from Chilean troops ended that escape attempt.

It was a perverse and painful experience that also marked the limits of my safety: as long as I stayed on this side of the walls that surrounded me, I was protected. Of course that did not dispel the fear: many times I imagined, during the endless months I spent in the embassy waiting for safe passage to leave Chile, that Pinochet's secret police would try to infiltrate someone among us in order to obtain information. or perhaps to assassinate the most prominent dissidents. Such paranoid suspicion helped me, almost half a century later, to construct one of the central stories of my novel

Allende and the Suicide Museum

, but luckily it never materialized in real life.

The thousand individuals crammed into that embassy, ​​and many more in other diplomatic premises scattered throughout the city, managed to leave Chile thanks to the right of asylum, the same right that has now been violated by the contumacious Government of Daniel Noboa in Ecuador.

This unprecedented act has already had dramatic and dangerous consequences. Mexico has broken relations with Ecuador, a condemnation that has been joined by Latin American nations from both the left (Brazil, Colombia, Chile) and the right (Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay). Such a crisis undermines the fraternal cooperation that is required to combat such pressing problems as drug trafficking, crime, migration and climate change that besiege our people. Without the minimum trust given, precisely, by certain international agreements to which governments of different political groups adhere, it is difficult to resolve the critical tensions and conflicts that inevitably arise in an era as unstable as the one we are living in.

Beyond, therefore, the practical consequences of this unprecedented assault on the embassy of a friendly country, it is the way in which it attacks the dream of the great Latin American homeland, that project of Bolívar, Martí and Allende, and also of Sucre, the great hero of the independence of Ecuador itself.

It is essential, therefore, that this crazy action by Noboa does not go unpunished, that no ruler in another nation dares to follow his example. Not only to restore trust between our countries, but to give peace of mind to those who will end up being the future victims of this crime.

It is inevitable, it depresses me to admit it, that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow there will again be those who will need protection from the danger of persecution by the regime in power. It is essential that, when they are welcomed in a foreign embassy, ​​they know that their lives are truly safe. It would be terrible if they suffered the painful and final fate of that stranger who threw his backpack and sleeping bag over the wall of the Argentine Embassy in Santiago de Chile so many decades ago.

Or are we willing to say goodbye to the right to asylum?

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