Ecuadorean police arrested a politician who had taken refuge in the Mexican Embassy in Quito on Friday night, after what Mexico described as a forced entry that violated the country’s sovereignty. The incident prompted Mexico to suspend diplomatic relations with Ecuador and inflamed already high tensions between the two countries.

The politician, Jorge Glas, a former vice president of Ecuador, had been sentenced to prison for corruption, Ecuador’s presidential office said in a statement, which added that there had been a warrant out for his arrest. Mr. Glas, who had been living at the embassy in Ecuador’s capital since December, was granted political asylum by Mexico earlier Friday.

The office of Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, added that the arrest had gone forward because Mexico had abused the immunities and privileges granted to the diplomatic mission, and that Mr. Glas’s asylum was given “contrary to the conventional legal framework.”

The arrest follows months of dispute between the two nations, in part over Mr. Glas, whom Ecuadorean authorities considered a fugitive. Both sides have been trading barbs, with tensions escalating this past week after the Mexican president appeared to question the legitimacy of Ecuador’s most recent presidential election.

Mexico’s secretary of foreign affairs, Alicia Bárcena Ibarra, announced the breaking of diplomatic relations with Ecuador in a statement, saying that Mexican diplomatic personnel had suffered injuries in the episode at the embassy. She ordered Mexican diplomats to leave Ecuador and said Mexico would file an appeal to the International Court of Justice.

And shortly after the arrest, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, issued a statement calling the episode a “flagrant violation of international law and the sovereignty of Mexico,” and saying that the Ecuadorean police had used force to enter the embassy.

Attacks on embassies carry particular weight because they are often viewed as a sanctuary for the citizens of their nations. They normally cannot be entered by the host country’s police without the permission of diplomatic staff. Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry said in March that it had requested Mexico’s permission to enter the embassy to arrest Mr. Glas.

Mr. Glas, who served as vice president under President Rafael Correa from 2013 to 2017, was sentenced to six years in prison in 2017 for receiving bribes. In 2020, he was given an additional eight-year sentence, along with Mr. Correa, in a separate bribery case. In November 2022, he was released early from prison.

A third charge, of embezzlement, was what led the authorities in Ecuador to get the arrest warrant that prompted Friday’s confrontation at the Mexican Embassy.

The rift between Ecuador and Mexico widened a few days ago when Mr. López Obrador made public comments about the 2023 assassination of Fernando Villavicencio, an Ecuadorean presidential candidate, and criticized Ecuador’s current president, Mr. Noboa.

Mr. Noboa took office in November, pledging to reduce corruption and crack down on drug-trafficking gangs. The country has been wracked by rising violence for years as the gangs have grown in power, culminating with Mr. Villavicencio’s assassination. Mr. Noboa declared a state of internal conflict this year, granting him special power to take on organized crime.

Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday called Mr. López Obrador’s remarks “unfortunate,” and declared Mexico’s ambassador in Ecuador, Raquel Serur Smeke, “persona non grata,” effectively ordering her to leave.

In response, Mexico instructed its ambassador to return to Mexico and appointed Roberto Canseco, head of the Mexican consular section in Quito, to lead the embassy, the Mexican government said in a statement on Friday. It also condemned the increased presence of Ecuadorean police forces outside the embassy — and granted Mr. Glas asylum.