The Peruvian government announced on Monday that it has decided to sever diplomatic relations with Mexico, after reporting that former Peruvian Prime Minister Betssy Chávez “is being granted asylum at the Mexican embassy residence” in Lima.
“The Peruvian government has decided to sever diplomatic relations with Mexico,” Peruvian Foreign Minister Hugo de Zela announced at a press conference.
The minister explained that this decision was made “in response to this unfriendly act and considering the repeated actions by the current and former presidents of that country to interfere in Peru’s internal affairs.”
De Zela stated that the Peruvian government today “learned with surprise and deep regret that former Prime Minister Betssy Chávez, the alleged co-author of the coup attempt by former President Pedro Castillo,” is currently in the Mexican embassy.
“I deeply regret that the Mexican government persists in its misguided and unacceptable position, which has led us to break diplomatic relations with a country with which, until these events, we had a fraternal relationship and shared many commonalities,” he emphasized.
The foreign minister clarified that the severing of diplomatic relations “does not mean” that “consular relations” with Mexico have been severed.
De Zela also said that what “needs to happen now is to receive formal communication from the Mexican government to begin the process” of potential asylum for Chávez, something that has not yet occurred, he specified.
Betssy Chávez is being prosecuted by the Peruvian justice system for her alleged participation in the failed coup attempt on December 7, 2022, led by then-President Pedro Castillo, under whom she served as prime minister.
Chávez was released in early September while in a Lima clinic, where she had been admitted for dehydration following a 12-day hunger strike in the prison where she had been held since June 2023.
The Constitutional Court (TC) had ordered her immediate release shortly before, determining that she had been the victim of arbitrary detention when the Prosecutor’s Office failed to request an extension of her pretrial detention in a timely manner.
Both the current president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have repeatedly demanded Castillo’s release, arguing that she was the one who actually suffered a coup d’état, which they attribute to the powerful Peruvian groups that control Congress.
Source: radioformula
