The Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy (ACJD) and the Blue and White National Unity (Unab) rejected the blockade of entry into the country that the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo have applied to priests and academics when they try to return to Nicaragua.
The dictatorship recently denied entry to the country to the priest Guillermo Blandón, pastor of the Santa Lucía Church in Boaco, when he returned from Israel and made a stopover in Miami and to the vice-rector of the Jesuit Centroamerican University (UCA), Jorge Huete, who was returning from Argentina on an academic activity.
Douglas Castro, a member of the ACJD, condemned the actions carried out by the regime against Nicaraguans themselves through the General Directorate of Migration and Aliens (DGME). He considers that the exiles of the vice-rector of the UCA and the priest of Boaco are “extremely serious.”
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“In the case of Father Guillermo Blandón, this blow is a continuum of the ferocious religious persecution of which the Catholic Church in Nicaragua is being victimized. Despite the fact that the dictatorship dresses up in Christianity on a daily basis in its constant speeches, in practice we know that their project is to end the religion of the people to replace it with a religion controlled by the Ortega and Murillo families, who control the State. and the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front),” he asserted.
María Laura Alvarado, a member of the Political Council of the Blue and White National Unity, stated that the repressive escalation of the regime against the Church and the academy is to try to silence the voices of the people who denounce the human rights violations that they commit since the state.
«They continue to exile and apply exile to authorities of the Catholic Church and the academy. We believe that these actions by the regime are to shut up and silence the population that still has the ability to raise their voices for the violations that this regime continues to commit against citizens and institutions,” he pointed out.
Ortega against academic freedom
Alvarado and Castro agree –separately– that the ban against the vice chancellor of the UCA pursues the objective of demolishing academic freedom, university autonomy and the suffocation of any space where young people and students, through teaching, They can cultivate critical thinking.
The former Nicaraguan ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) Arturo McFields considered that the Ortega regime imposed a “forced exile” on the vice-rector of the UCA. In addition, he assures that the decision of the dictatorship “demonstrates that Daniel Ortega, a bachelor who tried to study at the UCA, wants a society of sheep and gang members, willing to worship and blindly obey him.”
«Dr. Huete is one of the most renowned and prestigious academics in the country. This action against him is added to a barrage of attacks against academic freedom, and especially against the UCA, which reflect how the Sandinista dictatorship is wanting to suffocate any space of freedom and force all Nicaraguans to have to live in their institutions where we already know what predominates is propaganda and coercion,” Castro warned.
“The attack that he is committing against the vice-rector of the UCA, one of the objectives that we believe the regime has, is to try to eradicate all right to academic freedom, all exercise of university autonomy and of an education that may generate individual criteria for each student. This attack on the UCA points to that scenario, that the only university that remains in Nicaragua, which has academic freedom and demonstration as its banner, is silenced, “added Alvarado.
