Dictatorship closes San Pablo bookstore which propagated the Catholic Faith
In La Prensa, Jan 28, 2026
The central location of the San Pablo Bookstore and the Plaza España branch are closed.
The San Pablo bookstore, which has operated in Nicaragua for more than a decade, offering religious literature, Catholic Christian material, and liturgical articles, was intervened by the Ortega Murillo dictatorship, which for several months has forced it to remain closed.
The lawyer Martha Patricia Molina confirmed that that bookstore has been closed for at least four months by the intervention of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
“It has been closed for four months, not because they wanted it, but because the dictatorship had it intervened with the same issue: they do not want to allow the word of God to get to Catholic homes,” denounced Molina.
Central store and branches are closed
La Prensa confirmed that the central store of the San Pablo bookstore, located from the Rubén Darío or Metrocentro roundabout, one block south and two and half blocks west, exactly in the old Hispamer Building, is closed.
This place, according to the web page and social media of the San Pablo Bookstore, is open from 7:30am to 5:00pm. Nevertheless, the principal entrances to the building – at those times – were closed with metallic curtains, and there was no presence of any worker.
The same situation was confirmed in the San Pablo bookstore branch located in Plaza España, which also had a “closed” sign, and even in Google Maps the place is marked as “temporarily closed”. Since this place is not closed with metallic curtains, it can still be seen that there are shelves with products which are sold in this bookstore.
San Pablo remains silent about the reasons for the closure
In the social networks of the San Pablo bookstore, up to the publication of this report, there was no communication which would explain the reasons for the closing of their central store and the Plaza España branch, despite the fact that this type of business in the months of January and February, prior to and during the beginning of the school year, have greater demand for their products.
Despite the closure, the webpage continues to be active.
The San Pablo bookstore has been operating in the country since 2008 and in addition to its central store and branches in Managua and León, it has a distributorship in the capital.
According to its website, this business offers religious and literature, prayer books, Bibles, religious books, liturgical articles like rosaries, mementos, statues, holy cards and medals, as well as some school articles related to the Christian faith.
Religious persecution in Nicaragua
The lawyer Martha Patricia Molina, in an update of her report Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church?, presented to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), denounced more than 19,000 aggression and attacks which the Ortega dictatorship has perpetrated since 2018 against priests, religious sisters and laity.
Among those aggressions and attacks, in addition to the banishment of more than 300 priests and nuns, the lawyer denounced the prohibition of processions, acts of piety and the entry of Bibles or religious materials in Nicaragua.
“The persecution in Nicaragua has not ended. The Sandinista dictatorship prohibits the entry of Bibles to Nicaragua, and also controls the shops that make the statues that we Catholics use for veneration. They require that the craftspeople provide the names of the people who buy the statues and the amount that they invest in each purchase,” Molina denounced at the beginning of January.
