A new study on the persecution of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua revealed the testimony on condition of anonymity of a priest, who was told when leaving the country, to thank Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, because, if it were up to the messenger, he would leave “from here in black bag”.
The story is part of a meticulous study, prepared by the lawyer Martha Patricia Molina, who has put numbers to the viciousness of the Nicaraguan dictatorship against the religious after an arduous process of systematization that includes interviews and official pronouncements.
The priest added: “After that he told me: take your passport. He opened the door and threw him to the ground. I picked it up. So, he yelled at me: when you come back, if that happens, you already know that you get out of here in two ways: either in a bag or straight to jail ”.
According to the data collected, between April 2018 and October 2022, the Church was the object of 396 attacks, according to the second installment of the report. Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church? in which it has been established that aggressions increased during 2022.
The information indicates that 127 attacks were registered in 2022, while there were 54 in 2021. The increase is notable: the year of the repression of 2018 there were 81 attacks, 2019 closed with 76 and 58 were recorded in 2020.
“It is evident that the indiscriminate persecution of the Ortega Murillo dictatorship is due to the message, the dissemination of the truth and the word of the gospel that priests and bishops are carrying out,” Molina commented after presenting his research virtually, with a foreword by the Nicaraguan sociologist Humberto Belli.
The Catholic Church is the object of a smear and hate campaign on the part of the dictatorship. She is accused of being a “coup leader” by the Ortega regime, after in 2018 she raised her voice denouncing the State for human rights abuses, while she received dozens of victims in the parishes and at a public level she bet on a dialogue that reached agreements that the FSLN leadership did not comply with, among them the cessation of the aggression against the citizenry.
This questioning of political power for its abuses caused annoyance in the Ortega regime, whose operators reacted in various ways, as shown by the statistics compiled in the report.
different types of violence
Of the 396 attacks, 104 cases correspond to temples, 30 to non-profit organizations, the media and projects related to the Church, 133 attacks on religious, 53 graffiti and hate messages, 14 criminal proceedings without guarantees and 62 cases whose target of repression turned out to be the laity.
In relation to the 14 criminal proceedings against religious, Molina referred to seven imprisoned or convicted priests, two imprisoned seminarians, an imprisoned deacon and the Bishop Rolando Alvarez, who served 104 days kidnapped by the authorities this Wednesday, although on November 19 he will officially serve 90 days at home in jail, in a process without any legality, forced to be at his residence in Managua, while the authorities carry out a supposed “investigation”. Initially he was besieged and confined in the Episcopal Curia of Matagalpa from August 4 until Friday the 19th when he was violently transferred to the capital.
Condemned priests, for common crimes, are Manuel Garcia de Nandaime Y Leonardo Urbina de Boacoin which for her, as for all cases, her guarantees were violated.
“All the detainees have had their constitutional guarantees, the internal laws of Nicaragua, international treaties in favor of human rights, religious freedom, respect for the process and constitutional guarantees violated,” explained the jurist.
The dictatorship also closed eight radio stations in the Diocese of Matagalpa, desecrated parishes, sent 11 priests into exile, expelled the Apostolic Nuncio, prohibited one priest from leaving the country and prevented eight from entering, sending them into exile. 18 nuns of the Order of Charity were expelled last July.
However, despite the intensification of the repression, the silence of the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua (CEN) has been notable.
Silence from the CEN worries
Molina said that the silence of the priests, the object of siege, is the fruit of prudence, but that of the bishops of Nicaragua is “worrying.” “The same events (of harassment) were experienced in the eighties and the CEN spoke out. Now they are silent, ”he said.
Also: Orteguistas record and harass “signed” priests in Nicaragua
Molina listed 28 types of crimes committed against the Catholic Church, including terrorism, arson, discrimination, abuse of authority or functions, false testimony, assaults, firearms, pints, among others.
Although the study includes a foreword by the sociologist Belli, the study begins with a sentence of Monsignor Silvio Báez, Auxiliary Bishop of Managuawho went into exile in 2019 on the recommendation of Pope Francis, after being threatened by Ortega fanatics.
“The Church navigates among the troubled waters of human powers that attack it because they do not tolerate the truth that it announces, at the same time it advances resisting contrary winds that threaten and intimidate it to silence its voice,” said Báez.
Belli: “A medal for loyalty to its founder”
According to Belli, the persecutions that the Catholic Church has suffered are a “medal of honor, a testimony of fidelity to its founder.” The reason remains the same: a deeply humanist love of truth and man, while qualifying Molina’s systematization as a recent example of a history that he reviews from the colony, which also describes what happened in the eighties of the century. past.
“Tyrants, powers and ideologies of different signs, under the impulse of ambition, hatred and an undeniable Christianophobia, have not supported his prophetic denunciation of injustice and actions contrary to the dignity of the human being. For this they have made the Church pay a very high price,” Belli said.
Molina highlighted the message of hate from the presidential couple and the deputies against the priests. Ortega and Murillo have accused the religious, who denounced the human rights violations committed by the State in 2018, of being “coup plotters”, and even the tyrant last September said that the Church was the “perfect dictatorship” while accusing the priests of instigating his murder, without offering any proof.
The radicalization of the dictatorship against religion and civil society in general was questioned in a virtual session of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in which the Nicaraguan political scientist Manuel Orozco denounced Ortega for turning Nicaragua into a “rogue state”, in which fear, violence and clientelism prevail.
According to lawyer Molina, at least 13 priests were threatened with firearms and she recalled, based on the statements of a Honduran bishop, that at least 50 Nicaraguan religious are “with the idea of leaving in the face of the harassment they experience daily.”
The researcher regretted that at this time impunity reigns in the country and warned that nothing good awaits religious in the coming months if the documented growth of attacks reflected in her study is taken into account.
Molina is a lawyer who is an expert on issues of the rule of law and corruption. She is also the author of the study. “38 mechanisms of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment used in Nicaraguan prisons” which also denounces the actions of the dictatorship.
