The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has unleashed a hateful persecution against the Church in Nicaragua, which has led to imprisonment and arbitrary trials against religious, exile, torture and confiscations against Catholics and Protestants, according to the most recent report on religious freedom made public by the Nicaragua Never Again Human Rights Collective.
The defense organization presented, this April 24, the third newsletter on Religious Freedom in Nicaragua, which highlights the repressive actions of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship against the church.
The document indicates that, from June 2022 to March 2024, “65 men of faith have been prosecuted, both for political crimes and for publication of “fake news” and “conspiracy” and various (alleged) common crimes.”
The religious who have been brought to Sandinista justice are: three bishops, 43 presbyters or priests, five seminarians, three lay people and 11 evangelical missionaries.
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The defenders point out that the arbitrariness of the dictatorship reached the point of having kept 10 of the detained priests in jail during 2023, without ever presenting a formal accusation before the competent judicial authority.
This deprivation of liberty is considered kidnapping at the hands of the State, since no charge was ever made to justify his detention. “This demonstrates an action that has the purpose of depriving them of their individual freedom and removing them from their parishes where they were preaching,” the report indicates.
The Nicaragua Never Again Collective points out that “from January 2023 to March 2024, the arbitrary dispossession of Nicaraguan nationality and the de facto exile of religious people worsened. The organization has monitored the stripping of the nationality of 22 religious. 42 members of the Catholic church have been banished.
Against parishioners
Likewise, he denounces that this year the annulment of civic and democratic space in Nicaragua has deepened. More than 300 Catholic and Protestant organizations have been outlawed and in some cases confiscated.
Religious persecution in the country has not stopped at repressing the heads of the church but has spread to the parishioners. Data from the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners of Nicaragua details that at least 13 citizens were detained for having participated in religious activities, such as Stations of the Cross, processions, among others.
«All these people were in a situation of temporary forced disappearance for more than two months. Journalist Víctor Ticay is in this same situation of arbitrary deprivation of liberty, who was arrested after giving journalistic coverage to a procession held in April 2023 in Nandaime,” the defenders denounce.
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The Collective remembers that religious people in Nicaragua have been victims of at least “four crimes against humanity” that are contemplated in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Among these crimes against humanity, the deportation or forced transfer of the population, incarceration or other serious deprivation of physical freedom, torture, and persecution of a group or community stand out, “religious people being one of the main groups affected by repression in Nicaragua,” denounces the defense organization.
Microsite to inform and report
For the Nicaragua Never Again Human Rights Collective, presenting the third Bulletin on Religious Freedom and making available to Nicaraguans the “Virtual Microsite” that denounces the different stages of persecution of the church, is a commitment to the search for justice because “It is essential to demonstrate that in Nicaragua human rights continue to be violated, that the regime continues to perpetrate crimes against humanity, and persecution increases with greater cruelty towards the Church.”
The microsite, which you can access here: Religious freedomdocuments the four stages in which the repression against faith in the country has developed at the hands of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship.
«The microsite and the bulletin systematize the violations of religious freedom: prohibition of religious celebrations, criminalization of religious services, banishment and statelessness of religious, closure of media, desecration of temples, confiscation of property and bank accounts, expulsion of people and religious orders, religious deprived of liberty and arbitrarily denationalized,” details the organization.
Additionally, through the same virtual space, victims or witnesses of violations of religious freedom can make complaints safely.
