The United States bans the entry of former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa

The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, informed that the Biden-Harris Administration has decided to prohibit the entry to the United States of the former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa and Jorge Glas, who served as his vice president between 2013 and 2017. A resolution based on "their involvement in significant acts of corruption" while they governed Ecuador.

"Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado and former Vice President Jorge David Glas Espinel are ineligible to enter the United States due to their involvement with significant acts of corruption during their tenure as public officials," the U.S. Embassy in Quito announced through a communiqué.

The Biden-Harris Administration relied on the State Department's Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 2024 (DOS) to make this decision, the act enables a veto to access the United States to individuals who are under investigation or who are sentenced for their "direct or indirect" participation in corruption cases, whatever their nature, or who have committed "a serious violation of human rights."

This veto also affects the direct relatives of both Correa and Glas. That is, their wives -Anne Malherbe Gosselin and Cinthia Diaz Aveiga, respectively- and the children of both marriages.

Correa and Glas were sentenced to eight years in prison for a corruption case. The U.S. ambassador in Quito, Art Brown, stated that the former presidents "abused their positions as president and vice president of Ecuador, accepting bribes, including political contributions, at the expense of awarding state contracts."

Correa is outraged

After learning of the decision, the former Ecuadorian president, who has been in exile in Belgium since 2022, showed his indignation and exclaimed that "there is no justice" in the United States banning him and his family from entering the country.

"The human evil. They forget that no one in the world has accepted the sentence for 'psychic influence' and that five countries have given political asylum to those involved in the Bribery Case. They even put my family in the case. There is no justice!," Correa wrote on the social network X.

For his part, Glas - who has been held in a maximum security prison in Guayaquil since he was arrested on April 5, when he was taking refuge in the Mexican embassy in Quito- has been charged again with embezzlement, a crime for which he could be sentenced to an additional six years in prison.