3/26/2025 Nicaragua (International Christian Concern) — Nicaraguan persecution of religion has only deepened in the last year, according to findings published earlier this week by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).
Calling the state of religious freedom “abysmal,” USCIRF was particularly critical of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Co-President Rosario Murillo, who have led an aggressive consolidation of power in recent months.
The Ortega regime has aggressively targeted the Catholic church in Nicaragua since 2019 when some churches decided to shelter student protestors from police brutality. Seen as an organized force and a threat to the president’s total control of the country, the church has faced an unrelenting barrage of legal challenges and watched as many of its leaders have been imprisoned or exiled.
In its attempt to control the church, the Nicaraguan government has resorted to “arbitrarily arresting, imprisoning, and exiling religious leaders and adherents, canceling the legal status of religious organizations, and harassing and intimidating worshipers,” according to the recent USCIRF report.
“The Ortega-Murillo regime,” the report goes on to say, “also harassed religious leaders and worshipers through threats, conspicuous monitoring of religious services, and acts of vandalism, including against members of the primarily indigenous Moravian Church.”
Nicaragua withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council in February, days after a group of U.N. experts released a strongly worded report rebuking it for systematically cracking down on human rights, democratic norms, and religious groups.
“We are seeing the methodical repression of anyone who dares to challenge Ortega and Murillo’s grip on power,” said Ariela Peralta, an expert who contributed to the report. “This is a government at war with its own people.”
The Ortega regime claims that the U.N. and the Organization of American States, both of which have issued opposed Nicaragua’s crackdown on religious groups, are part of an international smear campaign against it. According to Reuters, Murillo denounced the U.N. report as “falsehoods” and “slander.”
In addition to announcing his wife as co-president earlier this year, Ortega has brought the legislative and judicial branches under his authority as well.
Thousands of nongovernmental organizations have lost their legal status due to a murky 2018 law on funding, with the Catholic church experiencing particularly targeted attention due to its outspoken criticism of the regime’s sordid human rights record and its decision to shelter student protestors in 2019.
The U.S. Department of State added Nicaragua to the Special Watchlist (SWL) of countries with particularly severe violations of religious freedom in 2019, a designation that continued until 2022 when it was raised to the Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) list. The latter designation indicates increased concern about the state of religious freedom in Nicaragua and normally carries with it certain legislatively mandated consequences in the form of sanctions.
“Catholic clergy and laity continued to experience government harassment,” said a U.S. State Department publication, citing media reports, “including slander, arbitrary investigations by government agencies based on charges that clergy and laity said were unfounded, withholding of tax exemptions, and denial of religious services for political prisoners.”
USCIRF similarly began including Nicaragua in its report in 2020, recommending that it be added to the SWL then and upgrading its recommendation to the CPC list in 2023. That recommendation was repeated in this week’s report.
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