In 1961, the Cuban dictatorship expelled 136 priests, closed the Catholic University of Villanueva and confiscated 350 catholic schools. Sixty years later, in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo have launched a similar or worse crusade against the Church and its faithful followers.
Nicaragua is experiencing a new round of violent governmental attacks against the Catholic Church. He has desecrated one temple, arrested three priests, frozen multiple bank accounts and thrown Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, the people’s bishop, into the torture cells of “the Hellhole” for more than 100 days so far. Ortega had him sentenced to 26 years on false charges of treason and the spreading of disinformation — in other words, for unrepentantly criticizing Ortega’s regime and its abuses.
Since 2018, Ortega and his wife have staged 529 irrational and illegal attacks against religious freedom, according to one estimate. The litany of attacks includes the murder of an altar boy, the burning of sacred images, a hail of bullets over the Divine Mercy temple and the arrest of a dozen priests.
Why this onslaught against the Church? Because it has a power that dictatorships do not understand or control. Church leaders keep denouncing corruption and government abuses with a voice that crosses borders and mocks censorship. Autocrats see it as a powerful and dangerous threat.
Ortega and Murillo have thrown themselves into the abyss. Nicaragua is the first dictatorship in the Americas to break off relations with the Vatican this century. Neither Venezuela nor Cuba (with 64 years in power) have committed such a diplomatic immolation. Ortega threw away a century of bilateral relations with the Holy See and unilaterally asked to close both diplomatic representations.
The Hellhole is a gloomy prison block at the Jorge Navarro La Modelo Penitentiary, located in the Municipality of Tipitapa. The Bishop of the Diocese of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez, has been confined in this place for more than 100 days. The dictatorship put him there because it could not break him or make him give up.
The Nicaraguan dictatorship has entered a new phase. Not content with imprisoning priests and confiscating clerical property, the regime is now going after Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes on trumped-up charges of money laundering.
The government has ordered the police, the National Prosecutor’s office, the Financial Task Force, the superintendent of banks and the judiciary to attack the Church. This is an unprecedented action the likes of which has previously only been applied to organized crime syndicates.
Ortega’s official narrative is that the leaders of the Catholic Church are “terrorists,” “a mafia,” “a perfect dictatorship” and other hyperbolic epithets. He has blamed the Church for an alleged coup that never happened and for other crimes that never occurred. The official narrative seeks to justify the new actions against the church.
But despite the violence and frequency of Ortega’s attacks against the Church, his actions have an expiration date. Rigged accusations, manipulated trials and smear campaigns are bound to fail. The Church stands firm, and “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
Arturo McFields is a former Nicaraguan ambassador to the Organization of American States, an exiled journalist, and a former member of the Peace Corps of Norway. He is one of of 94 Nicaraguans whom Ortega has declared stateless and traitors to Nicaragua.