The Nicaraguan government will force churches and religious entities to pay income tax and ordered the closure of 151 NGOs, in a tightening of control over these organizations unprecedented since the 2018 protests.
“Repeal” the point of the “Tax Agreement Law” where churches, denominations, confessions and religious foundations were exempted from this obligation, according to the resolution published in the official newspaper La Gaceta, signed by President Daniel Ortega.
The government also cancelled the registration of 151 NGOs, many of them commercial, three days after the closure of 1,500 non-governmental organisations, most of them religious, in what the opposition in exile described as an attack on civil society.
The mass closure brings to some 5,300 the number of organizations shut down by the government since the 2018 protests against it, which Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo say were supported by NGOs and the Catholic Church, dozens of whose clerics have been imprisoned and expelled from the country.
Related news: Nicaragua forces churches to pay taxes and closes 151 NGOs
As a prelude, Nicaragua last Friday put into effect a controversial regulation that requires NGOs to work only in “partnership alliances” with state entities.
A day earlier, Venezuela, a close ally of Ortega, approved a law on NGOs that human rights activists say will “deepen the persecution” of critics of President Nicolás Maduro amid allegations of fraud in his re-election.
– “Drowning in the Church” –
With the reforms to the law on “Control of Non-Profit Organizations” and under the law on “Regulation of Foreign Agents,” tax changes were included and now churches must pay taxes of up to 30% of their annual income, depending on the amount reported at the end of the year.
Church expert Martha Patricia Molina, exiled in the United States, said on her account on the social network X that the government seeks to “financially suffocate the Church so that it falls under its own weight.”
José María Tojeira, spokesman for the Jesuits, whose university was confiscated in Nicaragua, told AFP in El Salvador that “every day it is more evident” that “there is an attempt to destroy all possibility of religion and church, and to create a single way of thinking dependent on the power of the Ortega-Murillo family.”
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“We condemn Ortega and Murillo’s unjust closure of 1,500 NGOs this week and the violent harassment, detention and repression of members of religious orders and faith communities in Nicaragua,” wrote Brian Nichols, head of US diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean, in X.
The UN on Tuesday described the closure of 1,500 NGOs, most of them religious, and the confiscation of their assets as “deeply alarming”.
“It marks a new and dark chapter in the systematic repression that has characterized Daniel Ortega’s regime,” said former Nicaraguan presidential candidate Félix Maradiaga, in exile in the United States, in X.
The United States and the European Union maintain sanctions against Ortega’s closest circle, whose government is accused of serious human rights violations currently and during the 2018 protests, which in three months left more than 300 dead, according to UN reports.
Ortega, a 78-year-old former guerrilla who ruled Nicaragua in the 1980s and has been in power since 2007, maintains the protests were an attempted coup sponsored by Washington.
