The regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo expelled the Panamanian priest Donancio Alarcón on Monday night, who was abandoned by the National Police “barefoot” at the “El Espino” border with Honduras. The religious man participated Monday morning in the Chrism Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary in Estelí, which was presided over by Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes.
The expulsion of Alarcón was reported on Tuesday by the Catholic media of the Archdiocese of Panama, Panorama Católico, which on its Twitter account highlighted that “they left him barefoot on the border with Honduras.”
According to Panorama Católico, the 49-year-old priest is in San Marcos Colón, a municipality in Honduras, on the border with Nicaragua. Alarcón carried out his pastoral mission in San José de Cusmapa and Las Sabanas, both municipalities in the department of Madriz, which is part of the Diocese of Estelí, whose apostolic administrator is Bishop Rolando José Álvarez, who is detained in La Modelo prison and was unjustly sentenced to 26 years and four months in jail.
“We continue to pray for the Sister Church of Nicaragua, which, despite everything, continues with an unwavering faith,” Panorama Católico tweeted.
His arrest would have originated because Father Alarcón had already told the Catholic parishioners of the indigenous municipalities of Cusmapa and Las Sabanas that the church would carry out Holy Week processions in both locations. “Sandinista militants infiltrated in religious activities passed the information to the political secretary of the FSLN, César Olivas, about the intentions of the priest,” a source commented to CONFIDENTIAL.
Another source said that, during the Eucharist of Palm Sunday, in their parish they asked for prayers for the imprisoned bishop. Although Alarcón did not preside over the mass, they believe that the expulsion was in “retaliation because he raised prayers for Monsignor Álvarez on several occasions.”
According to the sources, the priest was arrested in Estelí, after participating in the mass with Cardinal Brenes. Presumably, Father Alarcón was taken to the local police station, where he “was beaten on the orders of Senior Commissioner Alejandro Ruiz Martínez,” Estelí’s police chief.
Alarcón is the second foreign priest victim of the Ortega persecution against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua. Last Friday, the newspaper La Prensa reported that the dictatorship prevented Uruguayan priest Néstor Mendoza, parish priest of a church in Palacagüina, from the Diocese of Estelí, from entering the country. The Migration priest limited himself to telling him that his entry was prohibited.
Holy Week without processions
The Catholic Church of Nicaragua had started the celebrations of Holy Week without processions in the streets the day before, after the prohibition of the regime led by Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo.
The dictatorship —through its repressive arm, the National Police— has prohibited the Church from taking the saints to the streets since last February, when it did not authorize them to celebrate the Stations of the Cross processions during Lent. The police order was adopted after the president of Nicaragua and Supreme Chief of the National Police, Daniel Ortega, branded priests, bishops, cardinals and Pope Francis as a “mafia”.
The Bishop of the Diocese of León and Chinandega, René Sócrates Sándigo, explained then that the police authority only authorized the Via Crucis to be carried out internally or in the atrium of the parishes, but not in the streets.
The researcher Martha Patricia Molina calculates that more than 30 processions have been canceled so far this year, although she clarifies that “it is a conservative number”, taking into account that only the Archdiocese of Managua administers 118 parishes in the departments of Managua, Masaya and Carazo, and each one has its respective celebrations, in addition to the traditions of Holy Week.
In mid-March, the Vatican closed its diplomatic headquarters in Nicaragua, and its charge d’affaires in Managua, Monsignor Marcel Diouf, left the Central American country.
The Holy See made that decision after the Nicaraguan government unilaterally suspended, in mid-March, diplomatic relations with the Holy See, after Pope Francis described the regime in Nicaragua as a “Hitlerian dictatorship”, whose top leader , Daniel Ortega, commented —“with great respect”— that he suffers from “an imbalance”.
The holy father branded the Sandinista government in this way a month after the conviction of the Nicaraguan bishop Rolando Álvarez, sentenced to more than 26 years in prison for crimes considered “treason”, and that Ortega called him a “mafia”.