The Argentine Foreign Ministry informed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility of Ecuador that the former minister and refugee citizen María de los Ángeles Duarte Pesantes is no longer at the Argentine embassy in the city of Quito and that she was absent from diplomatic representation “by own decision”.
“Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero communicated on Monday afternoon with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility of Ecuador, Juan Carlos Holguín, to inform him that the Ecuadorian citizen María de los Angeles Duarte Pesantes -who was staying with her son, minor of age and of Argentine nationality, in the Residence of the Embassy of our country in Quito since August 20, 2020- is no longer in said legation, which is guarded both in its access and in its external part by the National Police Ecuador,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
After that communication, the Argentine ambassador in that country, Gabriel Fuks, went to the Ecuadorian ministry to transmit that same information.
The Argentine Foreign Ministry informed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility of Ecuador that the citizen María de los Ángeles Duarte Pesantes is no longer in the Argentine Embassy.
Official statement ?https://t.co/9ZZ2sMFkm7 pic.twitter.com/LvCh4khwXb
– Argentine Foreign Ministry ?? (@CancilleriaARG) March 14, 2023
According to the Foreign Ministry, during the weekend of March 11 and 12, 2023, while Fuks was performing various diplomatic tasks, “No presence was registered in the wing of the building where Duarte Pesantes lived, far from the official residence of the Argentine representative, for which reason they proceeded to make the corresponding tours of the different dependencies, without locating his whereabouts.”
In early December of last year, Argentina decided -in exercise of the right granted by the 1954 Convention on Diplomatic Asylum and in accordance with the American Convention on Human Rights- to grant the diplomatic asylum requested by Pesantes, who since December 12 August 2020, she was staying at the official Argentine residence in Quito as a guest for humanitarian reasons, together with her minor son, of an Argentine father.
“Following the formal response, rejecting the subsequent request to grant the corresponding safe-conduct, within the framework of full respect for the norms of international law and always with the aim of strengthening good relations with the Republic of Ecuador, efforts were made in the search for a common understanding that at the time had been unsuccessful,” says the statement released by the Palacio San Martín.
And he concludes: “Everything indicates that beyond the status granted, and the will of the Argentine Government to maintain the status of diplomatic asylum, Ms. Duarte Pesantes has been absent by her own decision and without any indication to the authorities of the Embassy in the Republic of Ecuador”.
For her part, the former minister thanked Argentina – on her Twitter account – for having “sheltered her from the persecution of the governments of Lenin Moreno and Guillermo Lasso.”
To the country, my family and my friends: pic.twitter.com/ck4pMntAv5
— Maria Duarte P. (@MariaDuartePesa) March 14, 2023
“I decided to leave the embassy because by denying me the safe conduct that corresponded to me as a political isolated person, in accordance with the Caracas convention of 1954 and preventing my safe exit (safe conduct), the Ecuadorian government made me its political hostage”he wrote on his official Twitter social network account.
In this way, the former minister referred to the Ecuadorian government’s decision to deny her a safe-conduct in December 2022 for the former Minister of Transportation and Public Works to leave the country for Argentina, which granted her asylum.
In addition, Duarte Pesantes remarked in his publication: “I had to leave at risk, but I exercised the right that assisted me” and shared a phrase from the activist Martin Luther King who expressed that “injustice, anywhere, is a threat to justice everywhere”.
ridiculous!
María Duarte, patriotic and honest woman, involved in the cantinflada of the #Hot Flashes He had political asylum from Argentina, but the miserable Lasso government never gave him the safe-conduct that corresponded to him according to Inter-American Law.
Almost there pic.twitter.com/2xopz8I3pU— Rafael Correa (@MashiRafael) March 14, 2023
The former minister was sentenced along with former President Rafael Correa -asylee in Belgium- and other former government officials for being part of an alleged criminal structure that requested bribes for almost 7.6 million dollars from companies in exchange for contracts with the State, according to the Prosecutor’s Office.
