This interview of one of the principal Nicaraguan municipal experts provides perspective on the recent attacks against the Catholic Church and the upcoming municipal elections planned for November 2022.
Silvio Prado: “The Catholic Church competes with the government for contact with the population”
By Editors of La Prensa, June 5, 2022
The sociologist and political scientist Silvio Prado says that the regime of Daniel Ortega is moving against the Catholic Church because “it does not salute him,” it is the social institution closest to the population and represents a conflict for “Chayism”, the religion of which Rosario Murillo acts as its priestess.
In the opinion of the sociologist Silvio Prado, the regime of Daniel Ortega only has to subject the Catholic Church to install a model of singlemindedness, and for that reason has intensified its persecution against priests and religious.
In this interview, Prado also talks about the intentions of Rosario Murillo to be a “priestess of her own religion.”
Prado, who is an expert on topics of municipal governance, also talks to us about the municipal elections for this year, about the deterioration of the municipal governments, the massive migration of Nicaraguans, and the role of the opposition, which he thinks has been “deplorable”.
Do you think the situation of Nicaragua could improve?
It is a scenario that is going to get worse, that gets worse every day because we are facing an authoritarian regime that has decided that its form of governance is through domination and with the most violence possible. Physical violence as well as that shown with political prisoners, as well as institutional and symbolic violence which means the cancellation of so many legal entities. All these are acts of violence against people and against society. It is an authoritarian government that has decided to erase from Nicaragua all traces of individual and collective rights, and is going to get worse because it is a regime which has uncertainty and insecurity at its center.
In recent months a massive departure of Nicaraguans leaving the country has been seen.
Yes, it is a way of evading the repression. I understand the people. If you have no freedoms in a country, you cannot work, you have to leave. People leave because there is no life possible in this country (Nicaragua). A way of life is not just eating, going out to dance, it is also having the freedom to be as you want to be. Freedom of thought, freedom to form a club, an association, a trade group. If you do not have even freedoms, nor the possibility of improving your well-being, well then you have to leave. In some form the dictatorship is pushing the population to leave in order to be left with the few faithful ones who stay. It is what all dictatorships in Latin America and the world have done, pushing people to leave because they believe the country is a farm and they are only going to be left with the people who accept their rules of the game. It is a form of silent protest, the fact of leaving the country.
How do you see Daniel Ortega´s bases?
Everyday new challenges are emerging, new desertions from their ranks. Their repression is worse every day in two senses, repressing those who do not share their ideas as well as their own people. It is like a boa which contracts around itself and is oppressing society, their own people as well as those who are not their own. That is the characteristic of a totalitarian regime which in its own creed does not allow any margin for people or organizations, even their own, that is why it is not strange that while it is repressing opponents, it is persecuting critics within the Sandinista Front, within their own officials.
The fact that one day the ambassador to the OAS resigns, well their distrust toward their officials gets worse. The fact that one day a nearly folkloric character within the Sandinista Front like Chino Enoc makes very open criticisms against the way the Front is being led, it oppresses all possibilities so that those criticisms not be generated. It is a regime of government whose only form of relating to others is being taught to terrorize and teach its own people lessons: “If you continue with this, this could happen to you.” So, the best way of being a citizen is to not think in a critical way, not give critical opinions and not organize nor propose anything that is outside of the purposes and guidelines that the dictatorship has laid out for society.
How do you see the municipal elections this year?
The municipal governments are offices of the dictatorship. Local government as such does not exist. There is a basic condition for the municipal government to exist, and it is that they be autonomous, and if there is no autonomy, there is no local government. What exists is an administration of central decisions, but self-government which manages the affairs of its citizens based on the interests and demands of its citizens does not exist, because the local governments do not have their own capacity to decide, to make decisions based on what their inhabitants demand.
The coming municipal elections are going to be another front as the national elections were, a farse, because what elections are there going to be when there is no freedom to present candidates, to form political parties? The only space that there is going to be for the parties are going to be those straw parties, which are not true parties because there are no parties nor candidates which might contest for power and the logic within. Democracy is when the opposition competes for power. It is logical and necessary. The population are not going to go out to vote. If they did not go out to vote in the national elections, much less in the local ones.
How do you see the fact that some mayors have joined the repression against the opposition?
The municipal governments are administrative offices of the national decisions and in the worst of cases, the mayors, like in the case of Estelí and Matagalpa, are chiefs of the paramilitaries. They completely changed the nature of the local governors to chiefs of the repression and murderers. People have the right to feel forgotten, disconnected, abandoned because they feel that they are not the beneficiary of a management which is only focused on responding to the interests of the central government or the party.
How do you assess the persecution of the Catholic Church? This week they arrested a priest in Nandaime.
If yesterday it was the doctors, students, universities, civil society that they have been destroying, now they are going against a segment of society that does not ensure them any fidelity, that does not salute him (Ortega). The Catholic Church competes with the government in several spheres, among them contact with the population, and there is no social institution in Nicaragua that has more contact with the population than the Church. It competes for this direct relationship and it competes with it on the plane of ideology. A government that boasts of including an ideological spectrum from Christianity, socialism, solidarity, for them a religious spectrum that does not obey them is a serious problem. If they had a Catholic Church bowed to them that would repeat their discourse, there would be no problem.
Does Rosario Murillo have something to do with this persecution of the Church?
The other sphere which is not ideological, but the sphere of spirituality, in other words the soul of the population. Rosario Murillo pretends to be a priestess of her own religion, a religion that we might call “Chayism”, and every day preaches love, brotherhood and all the rest. The Catholic Church with its discourse of hope, of believing in a better future, that all tyrants are temporary, has a discourse that penetrates into the population, and where the seed of rebellion sprouts. The Catholic Church is her last obstacle for installing a model of single-minded thinking.
How is the population impacted when they get into it with their spiritual leaders?
It is terrible. These mistakes the Sandinista Front already made in the 1980s when it was a stronger party, better structured, with a clearer ideological profile, it already was mistaken and I thought that the Front had already realized that is was never going to be able to replace the religious belief of the population. For the people who are religious, they are getting into something of their intimate space, with an entity that has been involved in this for years and years, a series of symbols and rituals that are deeply set within the mentality of the population. You can do it through lay education, and you can form a critical awareness, but if you want to replace one religious creed with another pseudo-religious creed of Chayo Murillo, well it is not going to go well for you, it will be terrible. They are creating greater breeding ground for more discontent.
The population still is not showing that discontent as it did in 2018.
Who anticipated the social uprising of 2018? If someone would have told me, even on April 16th, that there was going to be an uprising of that nature, I would pay them whatever they asked. No one suspected it. These are the cycles of accumulation. People were fed up in 2018 after so many years. This time, the repression has been greater and logically the population is afraid. People are afraid that they are going to be arrested, that they are going to disappear them, that they will torture them, kill them, take away their homes, confiscate them or that they will have to go into exile or be thrown out, as happened with those poor musicians. Why are the people not rebelling? Because the moment has not arrived, and because there has not been a mobilizing factor. I believe that the dictatorship is contributing to a new social explosion. It contributes every day because it has believed that the most efficient way of governing is repression and people are fed up.
How do you see the opposition?
The role of the opposition has been deplorable. They continue with the same big obstacles and have not wanted to learn from their mistakes, and the population is not hearing another proposal, another discourse. The fight over individual egos continues. There are a ton of small groups of every type. You see them in the press releases. There are more acronyms than people who sign them. This is sad. They are not capable of reaching an agreement, their differences have more weight than their points of agreement. The fact that the opposition is in agreement with overthrowing Ortega is not enough. That was enough in the beginning, but not at this time. Now it is important to reach agreement around demands that mix several things: what is immediate and what is strategic. Are you going to get involved in an opposition where there is a dog fight every day? They even fight in public, in Twitter, on Youtube. For the love of God! There is a lot of immaturity. I do not deny that there are people who are making many efforts and I do not believe that the opposition is disunited because they are in jail, I do not think so. It is an issue of egos, of “I do not talk to you”, of the inability to administer the differences. If you are not in agreement with what So and So says, then I am now going to fight, and I am going to form another group, even though we are only three or four people, but I give it an acronym. That is how absurd it is.
Personal Plane
Silvio Prado was born and raised in Managua, but has spent several years living in Madrid, Spain. He graduated as a sociologist from the Central American University (UCA) and has a doctorate in Political Science from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid.
He has specialized in municipal issues. He does not like to be called a “political analyst.”
He was the director of the Center for Political Studies and Analysis (CEAP) and has worked in organizations in the municipal sphere in Boaco and Juigalpa.
He likes to climb mountains and hike. He also likes to cook. He says that he enjoys preparing a Sicilian plate called caponata, but his star recipe is marmitako which is based on tuna.