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In Nicaragua, a bishop and a group of priests and parishioners have been besieged by the police for a week in the curia of Matagalpa, in the north of the country. The authorities accuse Bishop Rolando Álvarez of destabilizing the state and organizing violent groups. Human rights defense associations have sent letters to the Vatican to intervene in what they denounce as an attack on religious freedoms.
“We are in good health,” said Bishop Rolando Álvarez during a mass broadcast on Facebook this Thursday. He and at least 12 other people, including five priests, have been held by the police in his curia for more than a week, for having denounced the closure of some religious radio stations.
Like several humanitarian organizations, the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights is aware of what may happen to him.
“These are situations of siege, retaliation, harassment, kidnapping of people and the group that accompanies priests and laity as human rights organizations,” explains Álvaro Leyva, general secretary of the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights.
“On July 25, we sent a letter to His Holiness Pope Francis with a report detailing a whole series of events where the regime is exposed for this violation of the human right of religious freedom for his intervention and his pronouncement on this chaos. , persecution, siege, retaliation, kidnapping that he is doing against the Nicaraguan Catholic Church,” he tells RFI.
Leyva explains that the relationship between the Ortega government and the Catholic Church was broken in 2018, when the latter tried to mediate the social and political crisis and sheltered injured protesters, although there were already previous tensions.
Leyva points out that the representatives of the Church “have never been in harmony or in tune with what the Ortega-Murillo regime has been promoting; There has always been a distance because the regime is definitely not consistent between what it says and what it practices.”
“The pastors of the Catholic Church have simply pointed out that lack of coherence, compliance in terms of human rights, compared to Nicaraguan constitutional rights and, definitely, that distance that the church has taken from the regime is the result that they are facing today. its pastors, its bishops of the Catholic Church”, he stresses.
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