Human rights defender and potential candidate for municipal elections arrested for trumped-up delict

On the 31st of August of 2017, at 11:45 am, in the province of Pinar del Río, journalist and human rights defender Lázaro Luis Ruiz Echevarría was arbitrarily detained. According to his sister, the previous night, the State Security officer Juan Pérez appeared with another policeman in their home. They told Lázaro Luis to come the following day to the Pinar del Río Municipal Police station. When he arrived to the station, he was taken to the prison, and the only thing the instructor said to his family was that he was going to remain under an investigative process led by the State Security. As the reason for the arrest, they presented the falsification of an official document. Before the arrest, Lázaro Luis's neighbors had come to his house to tell his mother Norma Urra Echevarría that she should alert him that the delegate of Circunscripción, along with the chairman of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), by orders of the State Security official Juan Pérez, were going to make a trap for him so that he was not present in the nominations of candidates to the Municipal Assembly. Due to Lázaro Luis's prestige before the society, he represents a strong opponent to the regime. According to his sister, the officers were preparing this trap for a long time, but since she knew everything, they were waiting with the realization. Earlier, Lázaro Luis and his sister were going to the Citizenship Attention of the Ministry of Interior when they were arrested and taken to the police station. There, Lázaro Luis was threatened and severely beaten in the stomach by the State Security officer, to which Lázaro replied that he knew that they wanted to charge him for a trumped-up case but he was not going to give up. Lázaro was released on the 2nd of September. On the 5th of September, the trial was held in the Municipal Court of Pinar del Río.