Ecuador’s raid on Mexico’s embassy shocked Latin America. Here’s why it may still pay off for Daniel Noboa

The dramatic scenes in Quito point to a new approach to crime in the region and underline how the youngest leader in Latin America may be throwing out conventional wisdom.

Latin America has seen plenty of diplomatic wrestling in recent weeks, from Argentina’s president calling his Colombian counterpart “a terrorist murderer” to Venezuela’s latest attempt to take back a territory ruled by neighboring Guyana. But none of that has been quite as hands-on as Ecuador’s highly controversial decision to raid Mexico’s embassy – a major violation of diplomatic norms that continues to reverberate across the region. Surveillance footage from the incident in Quito last week showed Ecuadorian police grappling with the Mexican mission’s top diplomat as they arrested Jorge Glas, Ecuador’s former vice president who had been seeking asylum from Mexico when the raid took place. The dramatic scenes also point to a new approach to crime in the region and underline how the youngest leader in Latin America, Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa, may be throwing out conventional wisdom – to the likely chagrin of his septuagenarian Mexican counterpart Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Noboa, 36, rose to Ecuador’s presidency in a political finger snap. His predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, resigned and called for early elections amid a constitutional crisis in May last year. The resulting race was dominated by the country’s rising crime wave – all too evident when an anti-corruption candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, was assassinated on August 9. The son of a banana tycoon with limited political experience under his belt, Noboa capitalized on the vote for a tough-on-crime approach. Less than two months after taking office, Ecuador’s security crisis made global headlines when gunmen stormed a television studio live on air shortly after one of the most infamous criminals in the country, Alfredo ‘Fito’ Macias, escaped from prison. ‘Fito’ remains at large, but since then, Noboa has kept the nation in a permanent state of emergency. He has declared an internal armed conflict against the drug cartels, sent the military to the streets, and called for emergency security measures to be drafted in the Constitution in a referendum on April 21.