Exiled Nicaraguan priest Uriel Vallejos denounced this Friday that his colleague Enrique Martínez Gamboa was detained by the National Police, bringing the number of priests arrested so far this year to nine.
In a message on Twitter, Vallejos stated that Martínez Gamboa, pastor of the Santa Martha church in Managua, “was kidnapped” on Thursday at 5:00 p.m. local time (23:00 GMT).
“The priests and the Catholic Church demand the liberation and the end of the persecution against the Church and the clergy. Justice, freedom and democracy,” she added.
In his complaint, Vallejos attached a video in which the detained priest appears haranguing a group of students outside the Jesuit Central American University (UCA) after finishing the so-called “Mother of All Marches” against the regime, on March 30. May 2018, which was attacked by police and armed civilians, leaving eight dead.
In the video, Martínez Gamboa asks the students who demonstrated against the Daniel Ortega regime not to “coward” and shouts “Long live Nicaragua”, “Long live the mothers of those who fell on April 19 (April 2018)”, ” Long live the doctors, the decent journalists”.
He also shouted “out with the murderous couple”, “out with the miserable murderers”, alluding to the Nicaraguan presidential couple, and then repeated “out” seven times.
The National Police has neither confirmed nor denied the alleged arrest of the priest.
The Nicaraguan Human Rights Collective Never Again took note of the denouncement of the detention of the priest Martínez Gamboa, and observed that his whereabouts are still unknown.
With this new arrest, the authorities increased the religious arrested in the last six months to nine, including Rolando Álvarez, bishop of the Diocese of Matagalpa and apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Estelí.
Two weeks ago, Ortega attacked the Catholic Church led by Pope Francis, accusing it of not practicing democracy, of being a “dictatorship” and a “perfect tyranny” and of having used “its bishops in Nicaragua to strike a blow of State” to his regime in the framework of the demonstrations that broke out in April 2018 over controversial social security reforms.
The arrest of Bishop Álvarez and the other eight priests, including Martínez Gamboa, is the most recent chapter of a particularly convulsive last year for the Catholic Church of Nicaragua with the Ortega regime, who has branded as “coup plotters” and “terrorists” the hierarchs.
Relations between the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan Catholic Church have been marked by friction and mistrust in the last 43 years.
At least six priests have crossed the southern Nicaraguan border, through blind spots, into Costa Rica in the last month, fleeing the repression that the Daniel Ortega regime has unleashed in Nicaragua against the Catholic Church. However, the number of religious exiles could be much higher, because most leave in silence.
The exodus of priests has been known, however, through the publications that some priests make on social networks once they are safe. Others remain silent out of obedience to their superiors or for fear of reprisals against their relatives in Nicaragua.
The current persecution of religious Catholics recalls the Sandinista repression of the 1980s, when the revolutionary regime assassinated, staged incriminating assemblies, expelled and sent religious into exile. One of the most notorious cases was that of the bishop of Juigalpa, Monsignor Pablo Vega, who in July 1986 was taken by force, in a military helicopter, to the Honduran border, where he was left to his fate.
Monsignor Rolando Álvarez himself, today a political prisoner of the regime, was one of the thousands of Nicaraguan exiles when he was a young seminarian in the 1980s.
Information of: EFE
