Living under police harassment in Nicaragua
By Divergentes July 15, 2021
A contender for the presidency arrested, an academic, a journalist, a priest and two activists tell their daily life under the harassment of the Ortega-Murillo regime. “We are politically persecuted people,” they state. The police state, imposed since September 2018 is one of the principal support of the Sandinista administration. The officers not only keep watch, beat and arrest, but their behavior has serious consequences on the lives of the citizens. For that purpose, the police have expanded their ranks from 15,643 agents in 2019 to 19,149 in 2021. Even though there is underreporting which the institution does not officially recognize.
For nearly a year, Félix Maradiaga was one of the most watched men in Nicaragua. A policeman became his shadow. An escort that was not there to protect him, but to control or restrict his movements, 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Beyond the violations of his political rights, right to association and meeting as a citizen with presidential aspirations, the worst of living under police harassments is the infringement of daily life, that which makes us human: going to the market, mass on Sunday, visiting your grandmother, your aunts and uncles and friends for sharing…Many hardships. Not being able to go to the park, travel or – as this politician persecuted by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo did – give up his favorite sport, running ultramarathons.
“And you can see that on me, right?” said Maradiaga giving himself some cheerful pats on the stomach. “it is tiresome to go out and run before 6am if first you have to ask permission of the police who are posted outside your house, and wait for them to communicate the request to their superiors.” The response frequently was negative, and when it ended up being positive, who wants to exercise with a patrol vehicle full of cops with rifles? That is why the presidential contender gave up on ultramarathons, and to make his loneliness lighter (also the insomnia) he got involved in playing online chess.
Maradiaga is 44 years old, but his sleep cycle is closer to that of an elderly person. While he was closed up in his home, he slept little and got up very early at 5am. He reviewed emails, messaging apps, responded to calls from journalists, and got lost in the computer in endless political meetings via zoom. He taped his radio program broadcast on Radio Corporación and would speak with his wife, Berta Valle, exiled in Miami along with their daughter, Alejandra. Maradiaga has not seen his family for more than three years by the imposition of a regime that in June 2019 took away his passport. Missing people is the hardest part of confinement, even if it is at home. (The day that we visited him in his home that he rents outside of Managua, which we entered after a rigorous police search, which included photos of the faces and identity documents of the journalists, Maradiaga showed us a drawing which his daughter had recently sent him from the Unites States. The little one instilled encouragement in the brushstrokes and her father, with a pride that made his eyes water, he said, “my daughter is brave.”)
The description above was the routine that the presidential contender had between December 8, 2020 and February 2021, when the police imposed a total house arrest on him. For example, Maradiaga tried to leave the house on December 17 to travel to the Northern Caribbean Coast to deliver humanitarian aid to the victims that hurricanes Iota and Eta left in their wakes, but the police repelled him with force. They broke one of his fingers and dislocated another two. In spite of the fracture, the police did not allow him to go to the hospital. That permission arrived two months later. “The fingers were left twisted”, stated the politician with humor, in spite of the difficult situation in which he found himself.
“It makes me a little ashamed to admit that there is a type of emotional acceptance of this process.”
How is that possible, if to go to the corner you have to ask permission and you are watched? This is not normal, we said to him when we interviewed him.
“Look, I am going to tell you without shame, I am afraid. But what happens is that with the passage of time, when you live under ongoing affliction and distress, you adapt your emotions. There is no other way. What is left is finding strength in different mechanisms, call them prayer, meditation or the strength that people give you to continue on. It greatly pained me that the day of the dead they did not let me go to Matagalpa to place flowers on my father´s tomb… I do not know what it is like to interact with my family, not just with the family that is outside the country, but even with those who are inside of Nicaragua. I do not know what it is to be able to visit my grandmother, for example, who is a woman more than 100 years old…Or my uncles and my sister, because practically you are exposing them.
At times it is not just that people surveilled, like Maradiaga, avoid exposing their family and friends to the police who follow them like a shadow, but they become a type of pariah. They withdraw from the surroundings that they frequent out of fear. “In addition, when I was able to go out to a park or public places, the police keep people from coming up to me or talking to me,” lamented the presidential contender.
The police harassment causes other problems for daily life. For example, it was difficult for Maradiaga to find a house willing to rent to him. The politician experienced that change in life all at once when he returned from exile in September 2019. Since the moment he left the international airport in Managua, paramilitaries and police have harassed him. Maradiaga thought that it was normal due to the media noise caused by his return. He was very mistaken. The police shadow increased. They watched him most of the time, but he could move about and would go to sleep without police outside of his home. Nevertheless, at the beginning of September 2020, the police surveillance became fixed like a permanent eclipse. His public routine moved to be controlled by the officers, ending his daily routine: the market, mass, visits to his grandmother and friends and the ultramarathon…
In this way, Maradiaga began the more dangerous transition to another marathon which he has been running for a year: that of the demand for democracy and free elections in Nicaragua.
Total home confinement came, and outings permitted by police superiors at the other end of the walkie-talkie which some officials, ever more tired of the perpetual vigilance, sustained. Also, the control and rejection of the visits to his home, and the beatings when Maradiaga demanded to leave. The day before they arrested him under the charge of “betrayal of the fatherland” (June 9, 2021) they allowed the presidential contender to go to Galerías Santo Domingo. Maradiaga walked with another person while six policemen from the Special Operations Office closely followed him inside the mall, while a policewoman was recording the conversation the entire time with a cell phone. This is living under total surveillance from the police in Nicaragua. Maradiaga is the most complete example of this, but there are more people who have experienced it since 2018, when the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship installed the de facto police state.
***
During the months of December 2020, January and February 2021, DIVERGENTES gathered denouncements from Nicaraguan citizens who were persecuted by the police. The form placed on the website allowed variables to be categorized and to identify what were the most common forms of harassment. According to the documentation received and a rigorous information checking process we can state that the police institution committed the following abuses.
Citizens reported 183 cases of police harassment. A pretty large number if we take into account that many people decided to not denounce it to human rights organizations or publicly due to fear of reprisals.
In this period, the police carried out 13 arrests of citizens who are opposed to the Ortega-Murillo regime. They also carried out in December 2020, January and February 2021 two arrests with physical aggression. The capture and aggression stand out here of the former political prisoner Lenín Salablanca in Chontales, who was surrounded by anti-riot police who came up to his home, took him by force and carried him away to the police station.
Also, the arrest followed by the attack on the activist Wilber Alberto Gutiérrez. He was abducted by police dressed in civilian clothes close to the Malecon of Managua. “He was out with his wife riding on his motorcycle. First a van showed up and then a patrol car. We do not know where he is,” denounced Gutiérrez´s sister. Gutiérrez is one of the citizens who led the campaign of Christmas without political prisoners.
In these three months four cases of police aggression were denounced. The last one occurred in February 2021 against the journalist Jairo Castillo, who was attacked by officers while he was covering a fire in the capital. If we added it up, we can state that during the months of December 2020 and January and February of 2021 there was a total of 207 instances of different types of police abuse.
At least 140 police abuses were suffered by men, and 59 by women. The rest of the denouncements were made by political organizations which do not identify by sex.
93 police abuses occurred in Managua, 20 in Masaya and 20 in Madriz.
The police carry out the police harassment in several ways. On occasions the riot police travel armed in a patrol vehicle through the principal streets of the city. The objective is to dismantle any attempt to protest. From north to south, east to west, from 6 am to 9 pm they carry out this type of operations.
Another form of harassment is what they do in a selective way They arrive at even the homes of the political leaders or citizens who form part of social organizations. They park in front of their homes and inform them that they cannot leave because there are “orders from above.” At times this type of harassment lasts a week. Others just one day. Citizens have denounced that they do not even let them leave to buy in stores in their neighborhood. If they try to, they are pushed violently even into their homes.
But the National Police are not just on the streets and specific places. They have also flooded the principal markets of the city with agents, along with supermarkets and malls. In Metrocentro, a complex of stores in the center of Managua, for example, up to three patrol cars stay there. They arrive at 8am and leave at nightfall. Mothers of political prisoners and relatives of victims of April used to organize peaceful protests there which were finally dismantled little by little by the police institution.
In recent weeks the police agents have established checkpoints on the principal highways of the country with the purpose of searching the vehicles and cell phones of the citizens. They delve into the chats of messenger apps, look for photos or videos that would indicate whether a person is dissident or not. Even though the implementation of the plan has not produced major results, the officers continue stopping buses and searching passengers one by one.
In June the officers have carried out arrest orders against five presidential contenders, leaders of political organizations, business leaders and journalists. They raid their homes, take cell phones, computers and documents and take them to the cells of “El Chipote.”
***
Professor Ricardo Baltodano took out his cell phone and began to read a detailed record of all the times that the police have arrived at his house. Up to March 13th they counted 268 days of police harassment.
“On Friday December 18: doomsday. They arrived at 6am. Initially one patrol car, dressed in black with chest protectors. They parked at the entrance to the garage of my home and took photographs from several angles, then they moved up a bit and placed four orange cones at the entrance to the garage of my home, blocking any possibility of the vehicle getting out.” The message he read while he remained seated in the driver´s seat of his car, the place where he granted this interview in the face of the impossibility of entering his house.
“Thereafter and with all precaution possible I sought refuge in another house,” he commented. The log of the harassment is a document composed of several tables that go 72 pages long. All with descriptions similar to those of that day. After that, he had not been able to return to his home. He has tried to several times, but within 15 minutes the police always return.
The routine of the 61-year old professor and former political prisoner has changed completely. He switches houses every so often, leaving a couple of days a week to make his purchases. On some occasions he has to work from his vehicle because the office that he had in his home has become inaccessible.
DIVERGENTES accompanied Baltodano one morning. Within his car he told how his routine had changed since the harassment began, which has become permanent since he got out of prison for being an opponent of the regime in June 2019. The actions of the police against him started small and increased. They went from being a few uniformed officers in the corners of his home, to installing a patrol car in front of his gate. Each one of these actios is duly documented not just by the log, but by photographs taken from security cameras.
“It became impossible to live there. I made the decision to look for a place to go permanently,” he said the morning of the interview, while he started the car and got ready to do a tour of the neighborhood where he lived. He decided to drive around San Antonio. But he was not there for long, he did not even get out of his car. Minutes before starting his car he called a relative who lives in the area. He told the person on the other side of the phone that he was going to drive through the neighborhood, that he tell him how the environment was. That day the police did not show up, maybe because they took for granted that the professor no longer lived there or they had lost track of him.
The San Antonio neighborhood is one of the oldest in Managua. Old buildings are mixed in with new ones. There are still homes with rooves of restored tile, that have the purpose of maintaining the essence of the old form of construction of the capital prior to the earthquake that destroyed Managua in 1972. The center of the Government has been installed in this area, which is why the avenues tend to have permanent police guard, even more since the April 2018 protests. In all the time that Baltodano has lived here, it is the first time that he had to abandon his home. Along the way he told about some pieces of his life, especially those episodes that are related to teaching and union organizing. In the Polytechnical University, the campus where he taught classes of history and the culture of peace, Baltodano was the president of the teachers´ union. The distancing from the FSLN dates from those years, because the party on coming to power terminated the activism of the union through the political control of the party.
While he drove along Bolivar avenue he mentioned the names of the students that he taught and who today are in the youth movement against the regime.
Would you go back to teaching?
“I am only waiting for this dictatorship to leave, he responds. I am not thinking of retiring.”
They are not going after Baltodano, he thinks that the objective of the regime has been to interrupt his routine, get him out of his home. Events started a little after he was released from jail in June 2019 by the Ortega-Murillo regime, along with 59 other political prisoners. He was arrested in his home in September 2018 for having demonstrated against the Government. His last name also has its history of quarreling with Ortega, he is the cousin of commandante Monica Baltodano. A family of Sandinista dissidents.
He slowed down on passing by his home. “This is my home,” he said, “I have not gone into it for more than two months.” There are no police around, no one on watch. But the security cameras of the home reveal that some months ago this block was packed with agents dressed in black with ordinance and firearms. The professor does not trust in the apparent calm. Even though there are no longer police agents nor cones, he decided to quickly leave the area. He is not going to let “someone” give the signal.
He quickly started the car and left the San Antonio neighborhood. He constantly looked in the rearview mirror to be sure that no one was following him. We asked him what his routine was, to which he responded, “ working on my car.” That day he was able to go out on the streets, but later returned to his enclosure, to the safe house where he has lived for the last months.
***
Starting in 2019 the National Police increased the number of officers in Nicaragua. An analysis of the data done by DIVERGENTES, based on annual statistical reports and official press releases, reveal that the institution has 19,149 police throughout the country.
In 2014 the National Police had 13,549 police, according to the annual statistical report for that year. In 2017 the figure increased to 15,479. Nevertheless, according to official data, in 2018 it went down to 14,946.
Security experts who asked to remain anonymous for this article explained that the drop of officials was linked to the protests of Abril 2018 and the dissatisfaction of the police agents with the repression ordered by the Sandinista regime. Some officers abandoned the country and left their uniforms in the homes of relatives. Others, like Edwin Antonio Hernández, who recorded a video explaining the reason for his “resignation”, were detained at the borders of the country before crossing over into Honduras or Costa Rica.
In 2019 the institution reported in their annual statistical report that they had 15,643 officers. In other words, an increase of 697 men and women. For that year the regime strengthened the state of siege of the police which had been installed in September 2018, after the social protests. The orders of the dictatorship were to dismantle any attempt to march in the streets or express protests in the malls of the country organized by the opposition.
In 2020 the press office of the police revealed that they had 16,909 agents throughout the country. Nevertheless, that data is not precise. The institution did not reflect in their annual statistical report that year three graduations that were held in February (708), June (818) and November (954).
If we use the data from the statistical report of 2019 (15,643) and we add these three graduating groups, which were reported on through press releases from the police themselves, the total figure in 2020 is 18,123 and not 16,909 as indicated in their annual report.
In May 2021 the institution held the graduation of 1,026 new agents. The addition of this figure with the accumulated figures results in a total of 19,149 officers. Agents that, according to experts in security, will be used to “protect” the electoral process planned to be held in November of this year.
For the second semester of the year the website of the Police reported that more than 1,500 youth from all the 153 municipalities of the country registered to take the basic course that this institution offers. In other words, it is probable that 2021 will close with more than 20,000 men and women at the service of the Ortega-Murillo regime.
***
Mariangeles Delgado exploded with boredom on the afternoon of March 23, 2021. By that date she had spent 51 days under police siege in front of her home. Anger came to her when the agents located in the street prevented her from going to work.
The order was that she could not leave. For three months the scene was repeated in different occasions, the uniformed police arrived, placed cones on half the street and remained parked there until the afternoon. Delgado is an architect, but also an activist of the National Support Group, one of the founding organizations of the Blue and White National Unity that emerged in April 2018.
“I am almost certain that many of them do not want to do what they are doing. You see that in their eyes. Many have apologized to me,” she commented.
The surveillance began on January 2nd, a week after she participated in a express demonstration held on December 23rd on the Highway to Masaya. The activist believes that they identified her through her social networks. Since then, she has received all types of threats from supporters of the Government.
According to her story, first two agents in civilian clothing arrived to gather information about her and asked whether she had a spouse and children. The officers asked the security guards of the neighborhood, “where does Mariangeles live?” The officers stated that they were there “for internal affairs,” while they told the board of directors of the neighborhood that they were there for some robberies reported. At no moment did they mention the name of the activist.
“One day I tried to go out to dump garbage and all the police came around me and told me that the order was to not allow me to leave, that as long as they were there, no one could enter or leave the home,” Delgado related.
The police dynamic developed in a similar way between activists, political prisoners and relatives of the victims. The deployment could be recurring or intermittent, depending on the context. For some of them the purpose is to demobilize them and break their daily routine. For Delgado it is the price that tends to be paid when a person goes out on the street to protest against the dictatorship.
For those who can pay for them, security cameras have become a tool for recording the harassment and making denouncements. Others are Excel tables. Delgado has documented each one of the days that the police show up to her house. In the entrance to her home and outside she just installed a security circuit that records the two streets that circle her home. From her living room she can see who arrives or approaches.
Delgado works in one of the sectors most hit by the economic crisis in Nicaragua. In spite of that, her work sometimes is interrupted by the police harassment that she experiences nearly daily and that also affects her collaborators. On March 23 she had to deliver a remodeling job, but was delayed because a patrol car was in front of her home.
“It makes you want to throw in the towel, but then you realize that you can´t”, stated Delgado. “I have maintained my protest and I will always go to any activity, even if there are just three of us.” That same day she denounced on her social networks where she showed the surveillance in front of her home. The next day, the police reduced their time to only being there in the morning. DIVERGENTES went to her home two days after the denouncement, in the afternoon, when the agents had left. But the cameras confirm that they were there.
***
A little girl walked in front of two officers dressed in the special clothes of the National Police. She was only a few centimeters taller than their hips. Both stood as gargoyles in front of the home they were watching in Bluefields. The girl, who wore a school uniform and had her hair tied in two ponytails, did not turn to look at them. She walked a little ahead of her mother, the journalist Kalúa Salazar, whose home has been surrounded by a police contingent.
“Scoundrals, go out and arrest criminals,” Salazar spat at them before entering her home. The next day, the harassment was repeated again. In spite of the police harassment, the journalist decided to continue with her habitual routine. That morning there was a murder, and while the officials remained outside her home, she gathered information for radio La Costeñisma, where she is the director.
“The police officers and the anti-riot police show up anytime they want at my home as if this property belonged to them,” stated Salazar from her native city.
The National Police have imposed a state of siege on the homes of opponents, dissidents and journalists. The latter have not been immune from the surveillance and harassment. While in the capital media companies are confiscated, in the Nicaraguan Caribbean the press experiences ongoing harassment.
The agents installed in the home of Kalúa carry an AK-47 rifle. They dress in black, the same uniform of the Special Operations Office of the National Police. In the country they are known as officers of the repression in the urban areas. They are the operational and shock troops who in 2018 along with the anti-riot police shot at demonstrators. In addition to them, a pickup truck also of the police remains in the street. Some cones divide the narrow street in two. They remain there the entire afternoon without saying anything, without presenting any order, without wielding any reason for their presence.
“They want to send a message, that they will not lose sight of you. My daughters feel that constant fear, every time those people go by they tell me that they are coming in to harass us,” said the journalist. In spite of that, she is firm in her decision to continue working in the radio. Leaving their homes nor allowing their routine to react is not in their plans. “This year is critical, and the population must have the most knowledge about the electoral context,” argued Salazar.
Almost all the journalists who are part of this media have experienced similar scenes to greater or lesser degrees. Salazar, in fact, faced a trial where she was found guilty for slander against two former officials of the municipal government of El Rama, but which she crossed off as political and an attempt to silence her. The denouncement came after the publication of a report where a source denounced the supposed irregularities within the municipal government.
“It is difficult to understand that a journalist would be accused of slander or anything just for doing our work. Let us remember that as a journalist we must give voice to this people who are afraid and scared because of the reprisals that they have experienced,” reiterated the director of the La Costeñisima Radio.
The Costeñisima has its history of resistance, marked by the ongoing harassment of the regime in the last three years. But it has also received attacks. One of those was the death of their director, Sergio León, in June 2020 of COVID-19. The journalist was also persecuted by the Government and was harassed in an ongoing way by the Police. Like Kalúa, he was denounced for slander and a few months before dying the Interamerican Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) granted he and his family precautionary measures.
In 2021, a year that is presumed to be an electoral year, the police have maintained the same repressive tone, to the point of taking away her notebooks and trying to truncate the coverage of the national press. On February 27th a journalist from Confidencial denounced that, on leaving a press conference in the Holiday Inn Hotel, she was searched by some policemen and they took her notebook away from her. That same day Kastalia Zapata, another reporter also stated that an officer touched her breasts while leaving the activity.
In addition to searches, harassment in their homes and groping, the police search the vehicles of the press, threaten drivers and take photographs of their identity cards. Nicaragua has become one of the most dangerous countries – without a declared war or an international conflict – to practice journalism, according to a letter that some 500 international journalists signed this past March 1 in solidarity with the national press.
“What is left for us journalists is to continue fighting, taking into account that we also have to take care of ourselves and our families,” Salazar ended.
***
Raul Oporta feels some eyes are watching him wherever he goes. It does not matter whether he goes to the park, the home of his mother, or to buy some things in the market in Nueva Guinea in the Southern Caribbean of Nicaragua, more than 300 kilometers from Managua, the capital. The eyes are always following him. Watching.
At the end of February of this year, the new police commissioner for Nueva Guinea, Norvin Díaz Somoza, accompanied by several patrol cars and more than 10 armed anti-riot policemen, surrounded his home to give him two messages: the first was “he was the new chief”, and the second was a “threatening order” to cancel a meeting that Oporta was going to have with other opponents who belong to the National Coalition in that municipality, to discuss strategies about the uncertain electoral process for November of this year. “Here in Nueva Guinea there are two Police chiefs. One is the one who is responsible for the security of the citizens. In other words, of the thieves and those people. And the other, is the one who is dedicated to the repression. That is the one who came to threaten me,” said Oporta, 52 years of age and member of the Renovating Democratic Union (UNAMOS), the old Movement for Sandinista Rnovation (MRS).
In the video of that day Oporta appears without a shirt, talking very peacefully with the commissioner. “I told him that the country is subjected to the biggest repression in history,” said Oporta.
The day that we arrived at his home, Oporta remained standing the entire time of the interview, making sure that police or zealots of the Sandinista regime were not close by. They did not show up. Nevertheless, he has sent to this media several photographs of at least eight different days when the police showed up to harass. “We are suffering some horrible calamities, in terms of the legality of this country: sieges, persecutions, jailing. It has been difficult for me, as far as where I am,” said Oporta.
The situation is not different in the city of Granada, in the Pacific side of Nicaragua. Every time a vehicle goes by his house, Efrain Ordoñez, a 52-year opposition leader in Granada, thinks it is a patrol vehicle of the National Police.
Since October of last year, the harassment has been ongoing in his house in Granada, a tourist city southwest of Managua. “This has caused me trauma, because every time that they come, they stop in front of the house, you can hear their radio communications and hear them talking, “said Ordoñez.
The harassment of Ordoñez does not have a specific timetable. They have showed up in the morning or in the early morning. In the afternoon or at night. In the beginning like five months ago the officers showed up at his house and told him that he did not have permission to leave because they could arrest him. “I spent the entire day cooped up. Until they left, then I could go out. But after a time I quit doing so, because I was afraid that something bad might happen to me,” said Ordoñez. And he added that “I live under stress and concern. My family is concerned. My emotional peace is not the same.”
Since then Ordoñez has adopted certain security measures. One of them is that he no longer goes out at night, or when he is able to do so, always informs several people close to him about the place and whose company he will be in, as well as the time for his return. “I do this to avoid any situation and leave evidence of where I am and who I am with,” said Ordoñez.
When the police installed themselves in front of his house, the dissident opted to not leave. This means that he cannot do normal things and prevents him from participating in academic or recreational activities. “They are preventive measures, because as a dissident I do not know what can happen to me. I feel threatened,” said Ordoñez, and added that he does not visit friends, because on occasions the police have showed up at their homes to interrogate them. “Many of them do not want to meet with me, because they do not want the police to connected them to politicians, because they are people who do not get involved in any politics,” he explained.
For some months now, Ordoñez has distanced himself from several personal relationships to avoid inconveniences. “Now I am a more solitary person,” he said with a little bit of humor. “In the beginning I was very concerned because I did not understand the harassment, because I am not doing anything bad. I was concerned because in the news the murders of opponents were being disseminated,” stated Efrain, and he emphasized with conviction, “But I have now lost my fear of that, and I assume whatever consequence of what might happen to me.”
***
Father Edwin Román says that he does not remember the last time he was at the beach. That pastime, one of his favorites, he was restricted from by the police which the regime of the Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo control. Román, pastor of the San Miguel Church in Masaya, has been living for nearly three years under police surveillance.
Everytime he tried to leave the city he was stopped by traffic police who asked him where he was going. On occasions they order him to return to the priest´s house or they “escort” him to where he is going. “The harassment increased after April 2018,” explained the priest who is known by the faithful of Masaya for being one of those most critical of the regime.
“But I am not accustomed to living that way,” said the priest, who revealed to DIVERGENTES that throughout this time he had to change his routine to try to get around the surveillance that the regime has imposed on him since September of that same year, five months after the April rebellion broke out in Nicaragua.
To understand the reason behind the harassment, it is important to recall the role of Fr. Román during the April rebellion. Faithful to his vocation of service, this priest set up a medical post in the priests house to treat the citizens who ended up wounded during the attacks that the police and paramilitary groups carried out in May, June and July of 2018.
Román many times advocated before the police authorities for the liberation of the political prisoners who they captured during those months. He also protected and delivered to the police station officers who were carrying out intelligence in the barricades and who were discovered by the protestors. And after the state of police siege was imposed, he has had the character of continuing to denounce the human rights violations that the Sandinista regime commits.
“They (the police) persecute priests and bishops because we are a prophetic voice, because we preach the gospel, we adapt it to the reality and in Nicaragua that reality is hard. We give encouragement and hope to the people, and because we denounce the injustice, that is why Ortega persecutes the church,” said the priest.
Father Román quit driving his yellow Suzuki vehicle to prevent the traffic police from continuing to “unfairly fine him.” Now he sits in the seat next to the driver and lets a driver take him to do his tasks. “I never thought that I would experience this myself. It is unfortunate that this direct harassment from the officials exists,” complained the pastor.
The police harassment is directly coordinated by the General Commissioner Ramón Avellán, states Father Román. Even though he does not remain in the police station of Masaya, Avellán is always calling his subordinates to ensure control of the city and keep the critics of the Ortega regime from rising up, as happened in April 2018.
“I cannot stop and eat in a diner, nor go out to anyplace…they are always taking photos, videos, following me,” stated Román, who confessed that on occasions he has had to eat lunch or dinner within his vehicle. They also surveil the priest in his own church, when he holds Eucharist.
The agents come in dressed as civilians and sit on the benches of the church to listen to his homilies. “They are watchful of what I am saying,” he mentioned. The officers record in audio or video each one of his sermons. They try to intimidate him so he quits challenging what the regime does in the city of Masaya.
“On a day when I have a homily I leave my home, I cross the walk to serve the parish and I return. I only go out for what I have to, in other words, to go to the pharmacy, my home or to the supermarket. Even though at times it is difficult because they are out watching me and recording videos,” the priest recounts.
The police surveillance has also affected his health. In recent months the doctors discovered a lesion on his back which must be corrected with seven sessions of therapeutic massages. He was able to finish only two because the officers followed him and they reprimanded him that he was going to the clinic to meet with dissidents to conspire against the regime.
“But what stands out is the fact that, for example, in my case, those who harass me are lower ranking police. They are youth from other cities, from the north or people from the countryside. Some friends have told me this, that they do not let officers from the city stay in their own municipality,” said the priest.
Román tries to live his priesthood in spite of the police harassment and the surveillance. During this interview that we did at the beginning of March, a member of the parish arrived to tell him that the police held him in the cells of the station for five days. The objective was to “get” information from him about the protest plans of the opposition.
“They asked me what you were out doing, if I met with the priest to plan something. They are paranoid, they do not know what to do,” said Pedro, who accepted offering these statements with the condition that we do not reveal his real name.
One of the episodes of police harassment where the government showed its harsh hand without fear happened in November 2019 when a group of mothers of political prisoners arrived at his parish and asked his support to carry out a hunger strike within the church. As a reaction to this form of protest, Avellán ordered anti-riot police officers to surround the church and not allow any people to came to their aid.
Those who showed up to leave water were captured by the police and tried. For several days the anti-riot police surrounded the church and cut off the water and electric.
“I try to live my priesthood even in this difficult moment in Nicaragua. I do not quit evangelizing and maintaining the pastoral unit. All of us are suffering the harassment, we cannot go out peacefully, we are persecuted. But the Holy Spirit accompanies us,” he ended.