The Land is Not for Sale! A community in resistance to La Parota dam.

Following our last La Parota post on June 29, when Mexican media reported that the project was postponed until 2018, things were looking good for the indigenous and campesino peoples defending the Papagayo River from destruction and their own communities from dislocation. On September 13, the Mexican government indicated that the project had been canceled, not allocating any funding for it in the proposed 2010 budget. After a seven year struggle, in which more than six resisters had lost their lives, the dam looked dead in the water.

Less than eight months later, however, the government restarted its push to force through the dam. On April 5, Jorge Antonio Mijangos Borja, director of Mexico’s National Water Commission (CONAGUA) announced that “if necessary, the hydroelectric dam La Parota will be built to provide water and electricity to the port of Acapulco.” He also announced plans for five other dams, three on the coast and two in Tierra Caliente.

The very next day, the state of Guerrero’s “leftist” governor Zeferino Torreblanca said, “[La Parota] is a project we should not abandon.”

Because the dam is slated to be built on communally owned indigenous land (ejidos and bienes comunales), the government must convince local communities to invoke a clause (added to the Mexican Constitution as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA) approving the government’s expropriation of their land. Previously, the government secured this approval through fraudulent “popular assemblies” that were eventually tossed out by federal courts.

Returning to the same tactics, an unelected pro-dam member of the La Concepción ejido convened an assembly on April 18. Lack of quorum and resistance by the Council of Ejidos and Communities in Opposition to La Parota Dam (CECOP) successfully shut that meeting down. The meeting was rescheduled for April 25.

At this second meeting, according to CECOP spokesperson Rodolfo Chávez Galindo, dam proponents recruited taxi drivers and other Acapulco residents, who they paid to illegally vote in an election meant only for community members. As a consequence, the assembly approved the expropriation of land for an access path to the construction site.

CECOP has promised to get this illegal expropriation overturned, just as it has with the past four.

The Land is Not for Sale!

Mexican media have reported that plans for La Parota Dam have been placed on hold until 2018. The communities resisting the dam have responded that they will maintain their struggle until the dam is canceled outright.

“This federal official’s stance establishes an aggressive position and demonstrates the desire to impose the construction of the dam by force, overruling the decision reached by the landowners who voiced their unanimous rejection through an assembly held on 12 August 2007,” the groups said. “Furthermore, he ignores the resolutions issued by the agrarian tribunals that annul the rigged assemblies in which the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) was granted permission to expropriate and occupy the lands.”

The dam — and the government’s attempts to impose it illegally and by force — has been condemned by the United Nations, Amnesty International, and the Latin American Water Court. Due to a federal court’s reversal of the expropriation of land for the dam, the project is currently on hold.

Read the story here.

On March 14, the International Day of Action for Rivers, CECOP brought communities together to protest La Parota Dam, and more than 1,000 people gathered as a governmental assembly in Acapulco condemned to project.

A CECOP representative told Arbor about the history of resistance to the government’s plans for La Parota dam. He then asked her to “tell the governor to respect the decisions that were made by our community,” referring to meetings in which locals rejected the government’s attempts to expropriate their land in order to build the dam.

If built, La Parota would flood out 25,000 indigenous subsistence farmers and destroy the water supply for 50,000 more.