The persecution of religious freedom by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in Nicaragua, especially against the Catholic Church, has been classified as a “crime against humanity” by the United Nations Group of Experts in a second report presented this week. Threats, physical and verbal aggression, stripping of nationalities, restrictions on the exercise of faith and religious traditions, as well as surveillance and desecration of temples, are the list of hostilities of which Catholic believers and other Christian groups have been victims.
With more than 70 people arrested between April 2018 and March 2024 for religious reasons, at least 84 priests have had to flee into exile, including bishops Rolando Álvarez and Silvio Báez, who were forced into exile by the Sandinista regime. According to the report, state persecution against the Catholic Church and other Christian groups is due to their autonomous capacity to generate social mobilization or bring people together.
Experts point out that this has led to religious institutions being considered a potential threat to the total control that the Sandinista administration seeks to have over Nicaraguan society. “In order to silence these voices and limit the influence that the Catholic Church and other Christian churches have in Nicaraguan society, the Government established and followed a strategy based on systematic violations of human rights and acts of persecution against its members,” the UN group says.
The report documents the attacks committed since the beginning of the socio-political crisis until March of this year, and highlights that far from decreasing over the years, they have increased since 2022. The human rights violations were led by the head of state. “The Group of Experts has reasonable grounds to believe that the intervention of the president and vice president led to systematic violations of human rights and the crimes against humanity documented here,” the document states.
Political prisoners for professing their faith
The more than 70 prisoners have suffered inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment in detention centres, the report says: “These practices were carried out with the aim of punishing detainees, intimidating them, extracting information and/or pressuring them to make false statements against other detainees or those being persecuted.”
Expulsions from the country have also been another measure taken by the regime. The Group of Experts counts 22 people linked to the Catholic Church and an evangelical pastor, who were deprived of their nationality among the denationalizations that occurred between February 9 and 15, 2023.
At the time of writing, 44 cases of expulsions of members of the Catholic Church and other Christian groups had also been documented. These detained, denationalized and expelled persons were also victims of confiscation of movable and immovable property.
Between 2022 and 2023, the Ortega-Murillo regime cancelled the legal status of nine universities and religious educational institutions. Before their closure and confiscation, these universities had been subject to attacks, surveillance and administrative restrictions on their operation, and their directors have been the target of persecution.
The report documented 18 religious media outlets that were forcibly closed, including four television channels and 14 radio stations. The closure of religious organizations has accounted for 9% of the total closures carried out by the regime since 2018, amounting to more than 3,500 NGOs. Currently, an estimated 342 religious organizations and foundations have been stripped of their legal status.
Uncomfortable Church
“Since its origins decades ago, the Sandinista Front has seen the Catholic Church as an uncomfortable organization and, therefore, has always been subject to different attacks. During the eighties, under the influence of liberation theology, Sandinismo invested a lot of attention in challenging the formal authority of the Catholic Church, also launching smear campaigns and various forms of repression,” contextualized the opposition and political exile Félix Maradiaga before the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
“The Sandinista Front has never fully respected the religious freedom of Nicaraguans. With the return of Daniel Ortega to power in 2007, and particularly after the protests of 2018, religious repression multiplied exponentially to levels never seen before in Latin America.”
According to Maradiaga, unlike totalitarian regimes such as those in China and Cuba, the form of religious repression implemented by Sandinismo is very particular, “since the attacks against the Church are not based on an explicit attempt to promote atheism, but rather on an obsessive attempt to subjugate and manipulate the faith of Nicaraguans.”
“The hypocritically religious discourse of Rosario Murillo and Daniel Ortega has been accompanied by systematic attempts to co-opt the Catholic Church. They have not succeeded and that is one of the reasons for their excessive hatred,” the opponent said.
Religious researcher and lawyer Martha Patricia Molina points out that the silence imposed on religious people goes beyond the emotional impact of separation from their families and community, becoming a migration problem.
“The dictatorship continues to deny passports to religious people who are in Nicaragua or outside of it. It also prohibits entry into the country and leaves them stateless, and there is no migration policy from the International Community that provides an immediate response to these legal aberrations. Religious people are re-victimized, attacked by the dictatorship and left unprotected by other States that demand official documentation to carry out the procedures and impose obstacles so that they cannot normalize their stay in the countries where they decide to stay,” says Molina.
Currently, the Ortega-Murillo regime prohibits Catholic activities in public spaces, although the Group of Experts also documented prohibitions on activities by other non-Catholic Christian groups.
The largest number of bans were in the context of Holy Week starting in 2023, when at least 3,170 Catholic processions were suspended, not including those held on Good Friday and Lent. In that context, one of the largest numbers of Catholic people arrested was reported, 21 in total. In 2024, at least 4,800 banned processions were registered. Eight people were arrested in that context.
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