Human rights defenders agree that the environment of repression and persecution against priests, bishops, and laity in Nicaragua forced the new priests to ask for their “excardination” so that they would not carry out their pastoral work in the country, but in their nations of origin.
Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, archbishop of the Archdiocese of Managua, reported yesterday, during Sunday mass, that a group of foreign deacons who were ordained priests asked him not to serve in Nicaragua, but to return to their countries.
Dr. Vila Núñez, president of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh), considers that the request of these new priests “is based on the express desire of these people who do not want to take any risk in any way or that their lives, their security and their religious exercise, their freedom of expression, cult and conscience is affected in a country where it has become a threat (being a priest)».
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“It is something terrible that completely exposes the perverse, repressive and persecutory characteristics of the Ortega Murillo regime before the world. As a Nicaraguan (it gives) embarrassment to others. They can no longer say that they are inventions of journalists, of the minuscule, of people who want to harm the government, what is happening, “said the human rights defender.
Context of repression
The lawyer, human rights defender and researcher, Martha Patricia Molina, told Article 66, that the new priests know the context in which the country lives and “they know that sooner or later the dictatorship will force them to leave.” He assured that no one is safe in Nicaragua, especially the religious.
Núñez indicated that the priests themselves “are afraid of being affected in their freedoms, in their pastoral exercise that they are saying, with their request, “this here is unbearable, there is a lot of risk here, I do not want to be here”, “he said.
“No one can doubt this demand of the ordained priests because Cardinal (Leopoldo) Brenes himself said it, who has been silent in the face of all the other outrages that have occurred,” he added.
I banish another priest
Yesterday, January 29, it emerged that the Nicaraguan dictatorship forced Monsignor Rodrigo Urbina Vivas into exile by not authorizing his return to the country. The parish priest of the San Juan Bautista de Sutiaba church, belonging to the Diocese of León and Chinandega, was preparing to return from a trip to Miami, United States.
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When the priest was at the airport, the airline informed him that Nicaragua had not allowed him to enter the country and that he could not board the plane to Managua.
Dr. Vilma Núñez considers that this action by the dictatorship is part of the religious persecution against the Catholic Church and that “regardless of how the priest thinks and his background or positions within the Church, he is a Nicaraguan who is being banished from the country”.
«(They are) violating his right to freedom of movement, to prevent him from his right to enter and leave his country at the time he wants and desires. This is a Nicaraguan citizen who is being denied the right to live and move from his own country,” he said.
Researcher Molina mentioned that forcing anyone into exile is a serious violation of human rights. She said that the Political Constitution of Nicaragua guarantees the entry and exit of nationals freely.
«I am making the third installment of “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church?” and it is evident that this year will be more disastrous than the previous one that closed with 140 attacks. The dictatorship is not providing any truce to the religious”, he declared.
Núñez stressed that he is a priest, in charge of a church, who is serving the city of León. In addition, that he is one more outrage that is located within the arbitrariness promoted by the Daniel Ortega regime and that mainly affects the exercise of his Christian faith and “attempts” against the Church itself. “We condemn this onslaught without limits that is being carried out,” he stressed.
The country that has been going through a sociopolitical crisis since 2018, in which more than a dozen religious have been arrested and more than 55 have opted for exile, according to a report by the Nicaragua Nunca Más Human Rights Collective.
The differences between the Catholics and Ortega sharpened in 2018, when the religious opened their doors to anti-government protesters fleeing armed attacks by police and paramilitaries, in the country’s largest social outbreak in almost half a century.
