At least one foreign priest has been expelled from Nicaragua and several people have been wanted by police authorities for trying to celebrate religious activities, which opponents of President Daniel Ortega say have been banned in the Central American country.
The priest Donancio Alarcón, a Panamanian national, and who was in Nicaragua in charge of two temples that belong to the diocese administered by Bishop Rolando Álvarez, was taken out of the country after officiating a mass on Monday.
“When I was going to the Chrism mass, they (the police) told me that they were going to expel me from the country, or that they were going to imprison me because we had dedicated all the homilies on Sunday to Bishop Álvarez and that he was organizing processions. I told them it was a lie,” the priest told Radio Hogar, from the Archdiocese of Panama.
Then he was taken into a patrol and crossed to the Honduran border and they told him: “you have left the country and you cannot enter any more.”
The Ortega government has not referred to this complaint, nor has the Ministry of Migration and Aliens.
Suspensions of activities in the rest of the country
This expulsion of the priest is added to prohibitions of the Ortega government to other activities within the framework of Holy Week. During the celebration of Palm Sunday, various temples carried out their activities within the Church.
On Monday, in several cities, parishioners were persecuted when trying to celebrate the traditional tour of the “Cyrenees”, an activity that goes back years in the Church of Nicaragua.
In the city of Masaya, south of Managua, parishioners released a video fleeing from the police who were trying to break up the traditional route.
The former president of Costa Rica Laura Chinchilla shared one of the videos and denounced that the parishioners are now “fleeing not from the Roman guard, but from the police” close to Ortega. “In the Nicaragua of Ortega and Murillo, Holy Week became a subversive day and the traditional processions destabilizing movements that must be repressed,” the former president wrote on Twitter.
Martha Patricia Molina, a lawyer from the Observatory for Transparency and Anti-Corruption, and who has carried out various investigations into the siege of the Nicaraguan Church told the voice of america that the orientations of the clerics in the face of the persecution of the Ortega government “have been to live these acts of popular piety, in the atriums of the temples with faith and devotion.”
In Molina’s opinion, Ortega fears the “agglomeration of the people” because it reminds him of the civic protests that took place in Nicaragua starting in April 2018 and he believes that if people are on the streets again they will protest “and the dictatorship will not have control because there is no police capacity in the country to control so many people without resorting to violence as it did before”.
However, he stresses that it is absurd since the processions are religious activities and people come to pray and live their faith; In the same way, he considers that “he has hatred towards the faith of the Catholic people and it is revenge for all that the Catholic Church has meant in this process of demanding respect for human rights in the light of the Gospel, it has been the only religious institution who stood up for the whole town”.
Nicaragua celebrates this April 18, five years of sociopolitical crisis which were repressed by the government, leaving more than 300 dead.
The country lives under a de facto exception regime, according to human rights organizations, and the government maintains a ban on all demonstrations, including religious ones.
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