The deputy dictator of Nicaragua, Rosario Murillo, announced with great fanfare the installation of the altars to the Immaculate Conception. Year after year, the Daniel Ortega regime orders State institutions to spend millions of córdobas on the lavish structures that occupy Avenida de Bolívar a Chávez in the center of old Managua. The Catholic Church is persecuted in the country.
In his litany this Tuesday, November 22, Murillo assured that the altars will be ready in the coming days, prior to the start of the novena on the 28th of this month. In addition, he announced that there will be a concert to “inaugurate” the stages installed on both sides of that avenue in the Nicaraguan capital.
Related news: Ortega has executed 396 attacks against the Catholic Church in four years of repression
The Ortega Murillo regime sells itself as a “Christian government”, but in practice it has persecuted the Catholic Church while it has been in the Presidency of Nicaragua, it did so in the 1980s and has done so for more than four years as a result of the social protests of 2018.
International reports indicate that the Nicaraguan dictatorship harasses the Church. The study “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church?” collects 396 attacks by the regime against the Catholic Church from April 2018 to November 16 of this year.
In Nicaragua, the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega keeps a dozen priests, deacons and laymen in prison. The bishop of the Diocese of Matagalpa, Monsignor Rolando Álvarez Lagos, is being held captive in his family home in Managua. In his brutal attack against the religious, he has accused some of them of common crimes and others of “conspiracy to undermine national integrity and propagation of false news.”
The dictator accused the Catholic bishops of directing an “attempted coup” by presenting him with a route to follow to resolve the crisis, which Ortega described as a “primer” for him to leave the Presidency.
The state repression against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua has left some 55 priests in exile, two in exile and multiple legal proceedings against a dozen religious, including priests, seminarians and lay people, reveals the VII Report Against Torture of the Human Rights Collective Nicaragua Never Plus.
The 2018-2021 reports on religious freedom from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRFfor its acronym in English), accused the dictatorial regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo of violating the religious freedom and worship of Nicaraguans, while condemning the attacks by fanatical supporters against the Church.
The study explains that although the dictator Daniel Ortega assumes that “religious freedom” exists in the country and that his regime manifests itself in propaganda as “Christian”; many leaders of the Catholic Church state that the dictatorship is “politicizing religion” and uses the language of Christianity to manipulate public opinion.
In 2019, close to 50 million córdobas (1.6 million dollars of that year) would have been spent on the installation and maintenance of 51 altars, revealed an analysis of data from Article 66. That year, only 13 of the 51 State institutions published information on the budget they allocated for this whim of the regime. The expenses of the other institutions were hidden from their public records.
