Nicaragua: Persecution of the Church Orchestrated by the Ortega Government

The study reports on 529 persecutions perpetrated by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega since April 2018, when anti-government demonstrations broke out in the country, until March 2023.

The aim of this report “is to show in concrete figures the attacks and assaults suffered by the Catholic Church in Nicaragua,” said Martha Patricia Molina. The 232-page document is divided into four chapters and lists each of the attacks, which have been verified and described in chronological order.

It lists the hostilities suffered by the Church over the past five years, including the ban on processions during the last Holy Week. The third chapter is a synoptic presentation of hostilities, and the last is a chronology of the “desecrations, sacrileges, attacks, robberies and assaults against the Church.”

However, says the lawyer, “there is an underestimation of the data because there are little or no denunciations on the part of religious authorities,” associated with “a growing fear and prudence on the part of the laity or members of religious groups in documenting hostile acts.”

The report cites that in 2018, the Catholic Church in Nicaragua suffered 84 attacks, 80 in 2019, 59 in 2020, 55 in 2021, 161 in 2022 – the highest number in the last five years – and 90 in the first four months of this year. The dictatorship expelled 32 religious from the country, confiscated seven buildings belonging to the Church, closed several media outlets, and in particular condemned Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa, to 26 years and 4 months in prison.

Answering José Manuel Vidal’s questions for Religión Digital, Martha Patricia Molina adds that Bishop Álvarez was arbitrarily abducted from his home while he was praying and had committed no crime. No one knows where he is being held because of the secrecy of the regime in this case.

In any case, Nicaraguan prisons have been accused by international and national human rights organizations of committing more than 40 forms of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. According to the Ortega dictatorship, officially the bishop is in a common prison system where he is serving a 26-year sentence for the crimes he was accused of in the trial.”

The author stresses that “the Nicaraguan Catholic Church is currently going through a disastrous period, the worst in the country’s history, attacked by the one who should be the guarantor of all rights, in this case the Nicaraguan State, but it is precisely the State which persecutes and attacks the Church.”

Martha Patricia Molina Montenegro, born in Nicaragua on February 13, 1981, is a lawyer. She studied at the University of Salamanca, Spain. She is a member of the editorial board of the daily La Prensa and has conducted several investigations into corruption in the public administration. Unfortunately, she will not find support with the Vatican diplomacy – whose silence on religious persecution in Nicaragua is deafening.