The Nicaraguan priest Manuel Salvador Garcia Rodriguez57, was accused this Tuesday of alleged violence against a woman, identified as Martha Candelaria Rivas Hernández, reported the Judiciary.
The priest, pastor of the Jesús de Nazareno church, also known as El Calvario, in the municipality of Nandaime, department of Granada, was charged before the Granada Adolescent Criminal District Court, Southern District of Nicaragua.
According to the four-page accusation presented by the lawyer Cristhian Katiela Huete Zeledón, representing Rivas Hernández, the priest is detained, although the place is not specified.
Last week the 43-year-old woman denounced through official media that the priest hit her on the right cheekbone with a padlock.
According to her account, the attack occurred on May 30, Nicaraguan Mother’s Day, when she and her two minor children went to the Nandaime parish to visit the priest, whom she had met two years earlier, she said, in the neighboring municipality of Diriá.
Supposed “close friend”
The woman, who claimed to be a “close friend” of the priest, explained that the attack occurred after she took the priest’s mobile phone and read one of his messages.
The priest “told me that ‘how audacious the audacity because cell phones are private,'” the woman narrated, adding that an argument then began and, when she was going towards the exit of the parish, behind the priest, he raised his left hand where she was carrying a padlock and hit her on the right cheekbone.
The priest has not offered his version, nor has the diocese of Granada, nor the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua.
According to the local press, both the priest and the sacristan, named Guillermo Potosme, were detained by the National Police, which has not referred to the case.
Before knowing the complaint, residents of Nandaime recorded the exalted priest, carrying a machete in the atrium of the temple and arguing with those who filmed him, who in turn challenged him to blows, threatened to stone him and yelled “murderer” at him. , “clown” and “father of lies”.
religious harassment
Until last May 25, the National Police kept surveillance on two parishes where a bishop and a priest were present, who described siege and harassment the presence of law enforcement officers.
That led Bishop Rolando José Álvareza critic of the government of President Daniel Ortega, to begin a day of indefinite fasting, prayer and exorcism until what he described as a police siege ended.
The Nicaraguan opposition has condemned what it considers a smear campaign by the Executive and the Sandinistas against the Catholic Church, and has recalled the persecution that the religious suffered during the first Sandinista regime (1979-1990) where a bishop was exiled, a priest stripped naked, another ten expelled and one accused of being a “counterrevolutionary”.
President Ortega has branded as “terrorists” the Nicaraguan bishops who acted as mediators of a national dialogue that sought a peaceful solution to the crisis that the country has been experiencing since 2018.
