Dictatorship has forced more than 260 religious to leave the country and maintains its surveillance
In La Prensa, November 15, 2024
Researcher Martha Patricia Molina denounced that the Ortega dictatorship has forced altar servers who are minors to take pictures beside the Police.
Since 2018 until now the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has exiled, banished, expelled and prohibited the entry to Nicaragua of a total of 261 religious men and women; 55 of them in this year, indicates the updating presented by Martha Patricia Molina, lawyer and author of the report Nicaragua: a persecuted Church. The most recent case is that of the president of the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua (CEN) and Bishop of the Diocese of Jinotega, Carlos Herrera, who was banished to Guatemala.
In detail 141 are priests, 99 religious sister or nuns, 13 seminarians, 4 bishops, 3 deacons and the Apostolic Nuncio. In addition to Mons. Herrera, bishops Rolando José Álvarez Lagos, from the Diocese of Matagalpa and the apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Estelí, and Mons. Isidoro del Carmen Mora Ortega, from the Diocese of Siuna, were banished the past January 13, 2024, after having been released from jail.
In 2019 Mons. Silvio José Báez, the auxiliary bishop of Managua, had to go into exile after receiving death threats. Molina clarified to La Prensa that the figure of 261 religious man and women who have seen themselves forced to leave the country “is barely an approximation because I have not included a religious order which was in the western part of the country, where 15 of its members between foreigners and nationals abandoned Nicaragua.”
The investigation indicated that the Ortega dictatorship “continues with its Machiavellian plan of wanting to eradicate the Catholic Church of Nicaragua, it wants to make the citizens into atheists because it has not been able to completely control the prelates. That is why it persecutes them, harasses them, threatens them with death, forces them to go into exile.”
Surveillance persists
Molina, one of seven people in the world to have received the International Religious Freedom Award granted by the International Religious Freedom Office of the State Department of United States in 2024, also denounced that the dictatorship has all bishops, priests, seminarians and laypeople under surveillance.
“They show up at formation houses to harass and interrogate the priests and seminarians,” Molina denounced and explained that during the week altar servers have been interrogated and pursued “several of them minors, they forced all of them to take photos and videos beside the police.”
The researcher also denounced that the religious sisters, principally those who belong to the orders whose legal status has been canceled by the Ministry of the Interior, “they find themselves intervened by the Ministry of Education and surveilled by police. Several of them have had to flee the country to save their lives.”
