The Marxist revolutionary’s religious awakening was a sham.
Leaders must speak out as religious freedom comes under sustained attack in Nicaragua.
D aniel Ortega, the Marxist bully who has turned Nicaragua into a police state, is busy throwing priests in jail and kicking others out of the country for daring to support democracy. As the number of Catholic clergy and laypeople he’s targeting continues to rise, political and religious leaders of all faith traditions must speak out.
Ortega’s troubling track record has been growing for decades. In 1979, the Sandinista regime replaced Nicaragua’s unsavory right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza. Daniel Ortega, a former Communist guerrilla, was its leader and supposedly was creating a workers’ paradise in the Central American republic. Anyone who drew attention to the Sandinista government’s nasty strain of authoritarianism — an unsurprising trait given Ortega’s close ties to Fidel Castro — was dismissed as a reactionary or, later, a tool of the CIA and the Reagan administration that supplied arms to Ortega’s undeniably sinister opponents, the so-called Nicaraguan Contras. We heard a great deal about Sandinista land reforms; less about the savage clearance of indigenous people that made them possible.
To the surprise of many in the West, the people of Nicaragua voted Ortega out of office in 1990. It seemed to be the end of his political career, but by 2007 he was back. The former Marxist-Leninist, who had ostensibly “returned to his Catholic faith,” tried to reinvent himself.
It was all a show.
Ortega consolidated power in the clearly rigged elections of 2016, after which he installed his wife, Rosario Murillo, as vice president. Wave after wave of pro-democracy protests were savagely suppressed, and for the past few years, Nicaragua’s Catholic Church has been a particular target of the regime.
Last Friday, Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa was sentenced to 26 years and four months in prison. The verdict reeks of totalitarianism: “Let it be declared that Rolando José Álvarez Lagos is guilty for being the author of the crimes of undermining national security and sovereignty, spreading fake news through information technology, obstructing an official in the performance of his duties, aggravated disobedience or contempt of authority, all committed concurrently and to the detriment of society and the State of the Republic of Nicaragua.” An influential member of Nicaragua’s Conference of Catholic Bishops, Álvarez had participated in discussions with the government since 2018, after the first crackdown on pro-democracy protests.
Earlier this year, a Nicaraguan court sentenced four Catholic priests to ten years in prison. The trials were closed-door, and the priest-defendants had only government-appointed lawyers to aid them. Two seminary students and a cameraman who worked for the church were also sentenced. Each had worked with Álvarez.
So much for freedom of association.
The persecution of Bishop Álvarez and his companions is not an isolated event. A priest in the northern Nicaraguan town of Mulukukú, Father Óscar Danilo Benavidez, received a ten-year prison sentence late last month for conspiracy and for “spreading false information.” Benavidez was found guilty of “conspiracy and cybercrimes” — ones invented by Ortega and Murillo to imprison opponents. The alleged “crime” Father Benavidez had committed was expressing his opinion in a social-media post.
So much for freedom of expression.
Last summer, the government outlawed the missionary order founded by Mother Teresa and expelled the order’s sisters from the country. The exile of this profoundly caring religious order followed the expulsion, last March, of Archbishop Waldemar Stanisław Sommertag, the Vatican’s envoy to Nicaragua.
So much for freedom of religion.
Last Thursday, Ortega’s regime released more than 200 political prisoners, including eight Catholic priests and two seminarians. The Nicaraguan judge announcing their release said that “the deportees have been found guilty of treason and charged with serious crimes, they are forever banned from public office and from competing in elections.” They were quickly ushered out of Nicaragua and are now exiles in the United States. But Bishop Álvarez refused to board the plane with the other deportees, choosing instead to remain alongside the Catholics who are suffering the repression of the Ortega dictatorship in Nicaragua. His 26-year sentence was handed down the next day.
One hero of the Church harbored grave doubts about Ortega as early as in 1983. That was the year Saint John Paul II visited Nicaragua and confronted various theologies of “liberation” that were springing from within the Church in Latin America. John Paul chastised Ernesto Cardenal, a priest and Marxist-liberation-theology activist who at the time held public office as the regime’s minister of culture, something incompatible with the ministry of Catholic priests. (Many years later, Cardenal was rehabilitated by Pope Francis.) In attendance during John Paul’s visit were authorities of the Sandinistas’ Junta of National Reconstruction, including Ortega and Murillo.
Unlike Saint John Paul, many in the 1980s turned a blind eye to the repressive aspects of the Sandinista regime because they detested Ortega’s opponents. This time, there is no excuse for holding back.