2023-05-15 20:11:00
Washington, United States | The head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, denounced this Monday the violation of religious freedom in Nicaragua and the imprisonment of Bishop Rolando Álvarez.
The State Department published its annual report on the state of religious freedom in the world on Monday, as it usually does with human rights.
Human rights defenders “sound the alarm about the attacks on the Catholic Church, by the Ortega and Murillo regime in Nicaragua,” a country under US sanctions for the repression of anti-government protests in 2018, Blinken said when presenting the report.
It refers to President Daniel Ortega and his wife and Vice President Rosario Murillo.
Among the people “unfairly detained” the Secretary of State cited Bishop Rolando Álvarez, sentenced in February to 26 years in prison for various crimes, mainly for “undermining national integrity”, after refusing to leave for the United States along with 222 political prisoners released and expelled from the country.
The Álvarez case is one of the issues of friction between the Ortega government and the Catholic Church, at one of the worst moments in diplomatic relations between Managua and the Vatican.
In an interview with the Argentine digital media Infobae, Pope Francis denounced in March the “imbalance of the person who leads” Nicaragua and said that it is as if he wanted to “establish the communist dictatorship of 1917 or the Hitlerian one of 1935.”
In 2022, the Nicaraguan government expelled nuncio Waldemar Sommertag, outlawed the Missionaries of Charity Association, of the order of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and closed Catholic media outlets.
In the report, the United States also denounces religious persecution in Iran, China, Russia and India. In the latter country, it condemns “police violence against religious minorities in various states” and the rise of “hate speech.”
It notes, however, progress in some countries. Blinken mentioned Brazil, based on the fact that the congressmen typified guarantees of religious freedom for Afro-Brazilian indigenous communities and approved legislation that considers discriminatory acts against any religious practice a crime.
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