The United States demands that Nicaragua release Bishop Rolando Álvarez

USA demanded this Tuesday from the president Nicaraguan, Daniel Ortegato release the bishop “immediately” Rolando Alvarezsentenced to 26 years and 4 months in prison, stripped of his nationality and suspended his citizenship rights for life for crimes considered treason.

“Once again, we call on the Nicaraguan Government to immediately and unconditionally release Bishop Rolando Álvarez,” the spokesman for the US Department of State, Matthew Miller.

The US statement comes when the bishop has been imprisoned for more than 500 days and just one day after Pope Francis, after praying the first Angelus of the year, expressed his “concern” about the detention of Catholic priests in Nicaragua .

In its statement, the United States questioned the conditions of detention of Álvarez, bishop of the diocese of Matagalpa and apostolic administrator of the diocese of Estelí, both in northern Nicaragua, and who is being held in the Jorge Navarro Penitentiary System, known as La Modelo prison, on the outskirts of Managua.

Specifically, andThe State Department criticized the fact that the religious man has been kept in isolationthe blocking of any independent verification of his health status and the fact that videos and photographs have been released by the Government that only “increase concerns about his well-being.”

In December, after the Nicaraguan Ministry of the Interior released some photographs, the activist Juan Carlos Arceone of the defense lawyers of the Nicaragua Never Again Human Rights Collective, considered that the bishop was “victim of torture.”

In February 2023, Álvarez was sentenced to 26 years and 4 months in prison, stripped of his nationality, and suspended his citizenship rights for life, for crimes considered treason.

The sentence against the high-ranking official was handed down one day after he refused to get on a plane that was going to take him, along with 222 other released Nicaraguan political prisoners, to the United States, which provoked the indignation of Ortega, who on national television described him of “proud”, “unhinged” and “energetic”.

Álvarez is the first bishop arrested, accused and convicted since Ortega returned to power in Nicaragua in 2007, after coordinating a Government Junta from 1979 to 1985, and presiding over Nicaragua for the first time from 1985 to 1990.

The relations between the Ortega Government and the Catholic Church are experiencing moments of great tension, characterized by the expulsion and imprisonment of priests, the prohibition of religious activities, and the suspension of diplomatic relations.

EFE