The setup against the priest of Nandaime: The Sandinistas who threw rocks at him now are “victims”
The Ortega-Murillo regime condemned the first Catholic priest in a trial plagued by absurdities and in the midst of the most repressive moment against the Catholic Church. The woman who supposedly was his victim contradicted the Prosecutor and was arrested, so they condemned the priest for another crime. “Christ giving his life for the people, for the poor, for the humble, being insulted, slandered by the false priests who were in the temples,“ justified Daniel Ortega in a public event.
By Divergentes, June 24, 2022
The homilies of the priest Manuel Salvador García in the El Calvario Church in Nandaime always carried criticism of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. The faithful of this parish that venerate the precious image of Jesus the Nazarene agreed that was the reason that the pastor was sentenced this Thursday to two years in jail and a 200 day fine.
He is the first priest arrested and tried by the Ortega-Murillo regime in a case full of irregularities and contradictory witnesses. The sentence arrived in the midst of persecutions against the Catholic Church, one of the few institutions within the country that maintains a critical posture against the dictatorship.
The priest was declared guilty for the crime of “threatening with a weapon” five people, to the detriment of Derek Santiago Rueda, Manuel Alfredo López Torres, Kevin José Espinoza Rueda, Lester Javier Chavarría Miranda and Cristian David Torres Romero. All of them are recognized Sandinistas from Nandaime, close to Mayor Roger Acevedo. Two of the supposed victims are grandsons of the Sandinista sportscaster Pedro Torres, and the others are associated by witnesses from the El Calvario neighborhood as “anti-socials”. Nevertheless, prior to this accusation, García was arrested after a denouncement made by Martha Candelaria Rivas Hernández, for alleged violence.
For the lawyer Juan Diego Barberena, an expert on judicial matters, this is another setup of the judicial system controlled by the regime. “The message of intimidation is highlighted from the place where the priest was arrested, which is the Judicial Support Office (DAJ, better known as El Chipote), and not in the preventive cells of Granada, which is where he is being processed in principle. This also shows the exceptionally political character of the arrest,” he said.
“It is a message of intimidation to the hierarchy of the Church, in other words, to the Bishops of the Episcopal Conference who have had a confrontational position,” he added.
The ploy, accompanied by a large propagandistic deployment of the regime, started on May 30. In her first story, Rivas appeared with bruises on both eyes and accused the priest of having hit her with a padlock. The 44 year old woman maintained that she had an “intimate friendship” with the priest, and showed up that day at the church with her two children to talk to him.
The story turned confusing when Rivas stated that both began to drink rum. After several drinks – as her narration continues – the woman took the cell phone of the priest and began to look through it, which caused the priest to get upset. “He went to the gate, I was following behind him and he had his back to me, I am to his left, and he told me, so you came to make a demand of me…with that he raised his hand, I bent down and I saw that I was bleeding and I called my daughter and said to her, “Come, the priest hit me,” said Rivas in the videos published on social networks by the media of the regime.
The narration of the events shows that, minutes later a group of people, followers of the government, showed up (who now consider themselves victims) to throw rocks and shout at the priest. “Come here and hit me like you hit the woman, son of a bitch,” they said to him, among other insults. García same out of the church with a machete in hand, angered by the scene. A patrol car of the National Police showed up outside, but García responded to them that he was in control of the church. The woman and her daughter slept inside the church out of fear of what the people outside might do to them.
One version disseminated by the La Prensa newspaper, related through interviews of inhabitants of the place, stated that Rivas showed up at the church for the purpose of requesting help after having suffered violence on the part of her partner in the city of Diriá. In the testimony, the woman states that the priest raised his arm with the padlock and hit her in one of her eyes. Nevertheless, in the pictures she appears with two black eyes. Rivas did not say how the other blow happened.
The arrest and trial
The priest was arrested on June 2nd, while he was in his home located in Carazo. The arrest happened one day after the propaganda of the regime unleashed in a massive campaign against the priest calling him in the social networks as “the machete priest.”
On June 7 the accusation was presented by the Prosecutor´s office. Meanwhile, the special hearing for the initial evidence was held on the 17th. According to the document written that day, Rivas changed her version and stated that the blow from the priest was “accidental”. “I was opposed to filing charges because I did not feel myself attacked, because it was accidental and that is why I did not sign any denouncement.” The prosecutor asked her if she felt she was violated by Mr. García. The woman responded that “at no time.”
Finally, Rivas was accused also for the crime of “false testimony” and is under preventive arrest, turning the case against García into one of the most outrageous from a legal point of view, according to experts consulted.
“False testimony is met in circumstances within the act of testifying, as evacuation of witness evidence before the judicial authority, which was not this case, because we are talking about the fact that the initial hearing was not the hearing of the public trial, which is where the evidence is evacuated,” specified Barberena.
The persecution of the Church
Since the protests of April 2018 the regime has unleashed an entire campaign against the Catholic Church which opened the churches to ensure channels of humanitarian aid. The onslaught has resulted in the exile of the priests most critical of the dictatorship, like Mons. Silvio Báez and Fr Edwin Román, from Masaya.
After the repressive escalation in 2021, when the dictatorship jailed more than 40 opposition leaders, activists and businessmen, the repressive focus has been placed on priests. The most recent cases were Mons. Rolando Álvarez, the Bishop of the Diocese of Matagalpa and Estelí, and Fr. Harving Padilla.
Mons. Álvarez was sheltered in the Santo Cristo of Esquipulas parish, located in Las Colinas and administered by Mons. Carlos Avilés after denouncing the police siege against him and his family “At the end of the afternoon, finding myself in the home of my niece, I have gone directly to ask the officers why they are following me. They have informed me that they are obeying orders. I have told them that they should communicate with the first commissioner that this persecution is now enough,” stated the bishop in a video disseminated through social networks.
On June 20 through the Nicaraguan Telecommunications Institute (TELCOR) the dictatorship ordered the elimination of channel 51, the Catholic Channel, from the television listings. The communication was made known by the business Claro, one of the principal companies that offers communications services. The channel was administered by the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua and a large part of its programming consisted in religious content. Nevertheless, after the censorship imposed by the dictatorship, they took on segments like Doble Play and also lent their signal to the Interdisciplinary Scientific Committee so that experts might provide alerts about the progress of the COVD-19 pandemic.
The attacks from Ortega and Murillo continue up to the publication of this article In an appearance held by Ortega this past June 23, in commemoration of Carlos Fonseca, a founder of the Sandinista Front, where he called priests false priests.
“Christ giving his life for the people, for the poor, for the humble, being insulted, slandered by false priests who were in the churches, who were those who had legitimacy, since Christ did not have a church, they did not recognize he had any legitimacy and believed that Christ came to get them out of the churches to make himself owner of the churches,” added the strong man.