Ortega and wife Murillo acted “in a joint and coordinated manner” during protests between April and September 2018,” Simon said, adding: “They have been weaponizing the justice system, weaponizing the legislative function, weaponizing the executive function of the State against the population.”
Among the regime’s targets, Bishop Rolando Álvarez, one of the strongest critics of the regime, was stripped of his citizenship and sentenced on Feb. 9 to 26 years in prison after refusing exile as commanded by Ortega. In addition, more than 200 of his compatriots were released from prison and forcibly exiled to the United States. The Sandinistas have begun expropriating their properties, according to Voice of America. Some were stripped of their citizenship.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, an attorney and media fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology Institute at the Catholic University of America, has written extensively about human rights challenges in Nicaragua and elsewhere in Latin America. Picciotti-Bayer is also the director of the Conscience Project and the mother of 10 children.
Picciotti-Bayer applauded Bishop Álvarez and fellow Nicaraguan bishops for calling on priests and religious to stand firm in the face of the Sandinistas. “While Bishop Álvarez is cut off from his people, the Church continues to be a voice not only for him and his people but also to rally global opinion about what is happening,” she said. The U.N. and the State Department have both called for the bishop’s release from prison.
“The U.N. is calling out Ortega for his brutality and hoping Ortega and the Sandinistas will disappear. But what I worry about is that they will up their game and that the oppression will become something we’ve not seen since Nazi Germany, as far as the attempt to silence any opposition,” Picciotti-Bayer said while pointing out that the Sandinistas receive arms and economic assistance from communist China and Venezuela.
Response of the Pope and U.S. Bishops
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