The United States demanded this Tuesday (2) that the dictator of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, “immediately” release Bishop Rolando Álvarez, sentenced to 26 years and four months in prison, stripped of his nationality and with his citizenship rights suspended definitely for crimes considered to be “treason”.
“Once again, we call on the government of Nicaragua to immediately and unconditionally release Bishop Rolando Álvarez,” US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.
The US statement comes at a time when the bishop has been in prison 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 the statement, the US 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, who is being held in the Jorge Navarro Penitentiary System, on the outskirts of Managua.
In particular, the State Department criticized the fact that the religious man was kept in isolation, the blocking of any independent verification of his health status, and the fact that the Ortega regime released videos and photographs that only “increase concerns about your well-being.”
In December, after Nicaragua's Interior Ministry released photographs, activist Juan Carlos Arce, one of the defense lawyers for the Nicaragua Nunca Más Human Rights Collective, considered the bishop a “victim of torture.”
In February 2023, Álvarez was sentenced to 26 years and 4 months in prison, had his nationality withdrawn and his citizenship rights definitively suspended for crimes considered to be treason.
The sentence was handed down one day after he refused to board a plane that would take him and 222 other Nicaraguan political prisoners to the US, which provoked the outrage of Ortega, who called him “arrogant, unbalanced and crazy”. on national television.
Álvarez is the first bishop to be arrested, charged and convicted since Ortega returned to power in Nicaragua in 2007, after leading a government junta from 1979 to 1985 and presiding over Nicaragua for the first time from 1985 to 1990.
Relations between the Ortega regime and the Catholic Church were damaged by the expulsion and arrest of priests, the ban on religious activities and the suspension of diplomatic relations between Nicaragua and the Vatican.
#demands #Ortega #immediately #release #Bishop #Rolando #Álvarez
