The bishop of the Diocese of Matagalpa, Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, 56, is part of the group of prisoners of conscience who are still locked up in the torture cells of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. Political, human rights and opposition organizations demand the immediate release of the religious leader.
The prelate was captured on August 19, 2021. The Ortega regime ordered a violent operation to remove him from the Matagalpa Episcopal Curia, where Monsignor Álvarez along with other religious remained guarded for fifteen days. The religious was under house arrest in a family home in Managua with police custody, but on February 9, the bishop was transferred to “La Modelo” after refusing to board a plane bound for the United States. That flight was to exile.
The Ortega justice accused the religious leader of crimes of treason against the homeland, for allegedly violating Law 1055, Law of Sovereignty. This legal tool was approved to persecute opponents of the regime. Álvarez is the first Nicaraguan bishop to be imprisoned by the Sandinista dictatorship.
Related news: Ortega justice sentences Monsignor Rolando Álvarez to 26 years in prison
The Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners assured that the bishop of Matagalpa was “convicted in an early and express trial with manifest violations of due process.” The Ortega justice sentenced him to 26 years and 4 months in prison, in addition to the loss of his nationality.
Monsignor Álvarez is “imprisoned for being critical of the government’s human rights violations, he has been detained for 208 days,” the organization highlighted.
For his part, Yubrank Suazo, a political prisoner released and an opponent exiled from Nicaragua, demanded that the dictatorial regime release the religious and pointed out that “the Church is not destroyed by scattering the sheep, nor by imprisoning the pastor.”
The prelate decided not to board a plane bound for the United States, where a group of 222 Nicaraguans were released and exiled from the country, who were also stripped of their nationality by the dictatorship for being “traitors to the homeland.”
The group sent out of the country, which represents more than 80% of those detained by the dictatorship, includes candidates for the Presidency of Nicaragua, journalists, human rights defenders and activists. The regime had accused most of the “deportees” of “treason and undermining the defense, sovereignty and self-determination for peace.” In addition, they were stripped of their nationality.
The Bishop of Matagalpa is one of the most critical voices against the Ortega and Murillo dictatorship, the binomial that controls the strings of power in Nicaragua, a country mired in a sociopolitical, economic, and human rights crisis since 2018.
