Manuel Antonio Obando Cortedano, a journalist from the Diocese of Matagalpa, where he was the head of the media, was kidnapped by police officers on the night of this Sunday, December 11, in the city of Matagalpa.
“It is known that he (Obando) was leaving his house with his brother-in-law and they both took them away,” a source confirmed to the digital media. CSI Mosaic. hours mLater, it emerged that Luis Pérez, Obando’s brother-in-law, was presumably released, but it is still unknown if Obando was taken to the departmental police unit in Matagalpa or to another place.
Obando was the one who accompanied the bishop of the Diocese of Matagalpa, Monsignor Rolando José Álvarez Lagos, on pastoral tours, who has been in captivity for almost 4 and a half months.
That same Sunday night, journalist Wilberto Artola, who worked for the cable television channel TV Merced, was also kidnapped.
The Police were looking for other former employees of the Diocese’s media who were closed at different times by the Daniel Ortega regime.
TV Merced was censored at noon on June 27, 2022 by order of the Nicaraguan Institute of Telecommunications and Post Office (Telcor).
“Today of Perpetual Help, we have been notified by Telecable that Telcor has removed us from the grid of said company. We entrust ourselves to the Virgin. And we ask ourselves again: why is it? God help us,” Bishop Álvarez tweeted that night.
Subsequently, on August 1 and 2, Telcor executed the closure of at least nine stations managed by different parishes in the Diocese of Matagalpa.
On August 1, when Telcor executed the closure of Radio Católica de Sébaco, the Police kept the priest Uriel Antonio Vallejos, parish priest of the Jesús de la Divina Misericordia Parish in Sébaco, Matagalpa, in a forced confinement for more than 72 hours.
In the early hours of August 4, the Police took Father Vallejos to a seminary in Managua and soon after carried out an operation to force the confinement of Monsignor Álvarez, initially together with 11 other people.
On August 19, Monsignor Álvarez was taken to his home in Managua, while three priests, a deacon, two seminarians and a Tv Merced cameraman, were imprisoned in El Chipote and are being accused of the alleged crime of “conspiracy to commit the crime of undermining national integrity, propagation of false news through information and communication technologies”.
