Ecuador has requested consultations with its ambassador to Argentina, Juan José Vásconez, the chancellery announced on Wednesday (10), after a demonstration presented by Quito to statements by President Alberto Fernández against Lenín Moreno.
“The national government has decided to call Ecuador’s Ambassador to Argentina, Juan José Vásconez, for consultations, with the aim of carrying out an in-depth analysis of Ecuador’s relations with the government of President Alberto Fernández and to develop the corresponding directives “, indicates the file in short statement.
The reason was the statements made by the Argentine president after being asked about a possible departure of his vice-president, Cristina Kirchner. “I am not Lenín Moreno. Whoever imagined this does not know me, ”said Fernández, in an interview with Argentine channel CN5.
“I can have disagreements with Cristina. We have different opinions on some things, but here I arrived with Cristina and here I go out with Cristina, ”he added.
In its protest letter, addressed to the Argentine chancellery through Vásconez, Ecuador indicated that “it does not accept offensive comparisons being made with President” Moreno. In another statement, the Ecuadorian government also said it viewed Fernández’s speeches as “unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of another state”.
Moreno, who was Rafael Correa’s vice-president, has a strong conflict with the former Ecuadorian leader, who ruled between 2007 and 2017 and is an ally of Kirchner.
The country’s president, whose four-year term will end on May 24, has been promoted by Correa, who describes him as a traitor. Their profound differences have plunged the situation party, in power for 14 years, into a crisis.
Correa, who lives in Belgium, was sentenced in absentia in 2020 to eight years in prison for corruption and is also facing a trial for kidnapping an opponent in Colombia in 2012. The former socialist president, who considers himself a politician persecuted by the Moreno government, says he faces nearly 40 lawsuits in the country, several of them suspected of corruption.
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This is not the first fight with Buenos Aires under Moreno. In October 2017, Ecuador expressed its “repudiation and disgust” with statements deemed offensive by then Argentine Ambassador to Quito Luis Alfredo Juez about Ecuadorians.
Juez once said he changed his clothes to avoid comments that “I am a dirty man and I have adopted Ecuadorian habits”, referring to the indigenous communities of the country.
“One of the best known are the people of Otavalo [do norte]. They dress on Saturday morning and spend the whole weekend in the same outfit. I was referring to this – so as not to spend every day in the same outfit, I went home to change, ”explained Juez, who was eventually replaced.