The Nicaragua Never Again Human Rights Collective documented that at least 13 lay people detained by the Nicaraguan regime after participating in religious activities or being linked to the Catholic Church were part of the group of 135 released political prisoners who were exiled on September 5 on a direct flight to Guatemala.
Attorney Salvador Marenco, a master in public law and defender of the Nicaragua Never Again Human Rights Collective, stated that “before the exile of the 135 people, who were released on September 5, there were at least 13 people who remained detained, who were lay people, for having participated in religious activities.”
He stressed that since the first arrest of priests, which occurred in June 2022, the country has “established a system of generalized persecution against religious people, especially against the Catholic Church, and evidently this situation has transcended from religious leaders to the faithful and lay people.”
The lawyer mentioned, as part of the persecution against lay people and people linked to religious activities, the arrest of journalist Víctor Ticay, who was kidnapped by the Ortega regime after covering —on April 5, 2023— the religious tradition La Reseña, during the Easter festivities, in Nandaime, a municipality of Granada.
“Before this release and other arrests, we had counted approximately 65 religious people who had been prosecuted and many of them convicted. In fact, of those 65 religious people, at least 10 were prosecuted in absentia, who were part of the list of the 94 who were denationalized in 2023,” Marenco said.
“Intense and systematic” persecution
In its Bulletin 4 on “Freedom of Religion in Nicaragua,” the Human Rights Collective documented the persecution of these lay people, pointing out that between April 1 and July 15, they documented “multiple violations of freedom of religion” in the country, which was evidenced by “arbitrary detentions, direct attacks on religious leaders, stigmatization, and hate messages.”
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In the document, the defenders denounced that during this period the Ortega regime increased harassment against lay people and religious leaders, especially by expelling congregations and closing non-governmental organizations with religious tendencies, with the aim of “economically weakening the Church.”
As of July 15, the Collective had recorded the cancellation of at least 419 organizations associated with the Catholic Church or evangelical groups. The number of religious NGOs cancelled to date is higher, since the Ortega regime wiped out —on August 19— 1,500 non-profit organizations and associations, most of them linked to evangelical and Catholic churches.
The impact of all this persecution, arrests, cancellations, banishments, restrictions on entry to Nicaragua, according to lawyer Marenco — in addition to causing many churches to be empty — generates in the population “fear of professing their faith, participating in activities even within the temples, because one cannot participate in any public religious activity.”
He explained that the persecution against people linked to churches has not only occurred through criminalization but also in “non-judicial spaces, for example, the prohibition of processions, that this has a direct impact and that if you do it directly you risk being arrested, or expressing some kind of opinion in favor of the Catholic Church or a detained priest.”
Crimes against humanity against lay people
Bulletin 4 on “Religious Freedom in Nicaragua” also states that in the country harassment and arrests “are the order of the day in various cities,” where arrests and constant surveillance have been documented.
The defenders documented the forced expulsion and displacement of 200 religious persons and the increased surveillance of the activities carried out, especially by the Catholic Church.
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“Parishioners and lay people are not only arrested, but also forced to fabricate crimes against priests or members of the Catholic Church through express arrests or threats,” the Collective’s bulletin states.
Lawyer Marenco explained that as an organization they have identified four stages of criminalization, mainly against faith, against the Catholic and Evangelical churches, and this last stage, “is imminently marked by exile, illegal detentions, even now denationalization and forced disappearance, that is, crimes against humanity that continue to be perpetrated every day in the country.”
Some of the lay people who were arrested by the Ortega regime last year and were released, exiled and denationalized on September 5, whose arrests the Collective also documented in its bulletin, which occurred in December of last year, were Julio Sevilla Berríos, María Herrera Galeano, Freydell Sevilla and Santos Sevilla.
