On September 3, Guerrero state police arrested a prominent opponent of La Parota dam on an expired arrest warrant and held him for 20 hours, in the latest example of the government’s determination to impose the dam by force.

In 2004, Jacinto Solís Vázquez and 6 other members of the Council of Ejidos and Communities in Opposition to La Parota Dam (CECOP) were arrested and falsely charged with kidnapping a federal engineer. The court ordered their release and cancelled the arrest warrants that same year.

Nevertheless, Guerrero’s Ministerial Investigative Police (PIM) arrested Solís on the cancelled warrant on Wednesday and held him for nearly a full day before releasing him, claiming the court had never notified them that the warrant had been rescinded.

This is consistent with a regular pattern of law enforcement harassment of prominent CECOP members, such as CECOP spokesperson Rodolfo Chávez Galindo’s arrest (and eventual release) on the same bogus charge in 2007.