Nicaragua: The Ortega-Murillo Regime Against the Catholic Church

The film opens with a prayer: "Lord, you are the God who walks with the oppressed." Next, an exiled person speaks, recalling how, from Managua, they spoke out against Ortega and Murillo and denounced arbitrary arrests and torture. They say they realized that everyone who openly opposed the regime would soon face some form of attack. When a friend warned them that they were in imminent danger, they decided to leave the country.

The narrator offers the first figures. According to the documentary, 245 priests and nuns were expelled from Nicaragua and stripped of their nationality. Persecuted worshippers had to go into hiding, and a mass exodus followed: 600,000 people, 10% of the population, fled abroad.

The central figure is Martha Patricia Molina, a Nicaraguan lawyer and practicing Catholic activist. She took refuge in the United States with her family in 2021 and works for an NGO that helps exiles. Her mission, according to the documentary, is to record the Ortega government's acts of violence against the Catholic Church.

In an interview, she sums up her assessment: the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship "has set out to annihilate religious freedom," and that is why it constantly persecutes the Church. As late as 2024, she warned that the year could end up being worse than the ones before it. She estimates that she devotes about 70% of her time to her study, titled Nicaragua, a Persecuted Church, and that to carry it out she speaks with priests, seminarians and nuns. She explains that she lives through the sorrows and hardships of those still in the country in real time, from a distance.

Molina also acknowledges that her work is only possible because she is outside the country. Thanks to the peace and security she has in the United States, she has been able to produce the study, because in Nicaragua what she does would be considered "an act of terrorism" and she would already be in prison. Her position is that as long as the regime keeps doing harm, she will keep documenting it, because "someone has to do it." She also points to a contradiction in her life: although she can practice her faith freely in the United States, her heart and mind remain in Nicaragua, and it pains her that her friends and the religious who remain there are under siege.

The documentary shows how the persecution reaches into a family's life. A woman close to Molina says that she alone, in all of Nicaragua, has resolved to defend the Church in that way. According to the narrator, a mother and two children were only able to reunite with Molina in 2022, after being harassed on several occasions, and entered the United States through a humanitarian program.

A boy's story serves to illustrate the restrictions. He was part of the parish music band and its groups, and he watched as the police arrived to ban those activities. The family assumes that, at his age, he still doesn't understand why the police repressed people instead of protecting them. A photograph recalls his last religious reenactment. It could no longer be held in the streets near the parish as before, because the police required that all such activities take place inside churches. After that, no more permits were granted, and that, the family says, is the activity the boy misses most.

Another testimony comes from an exiled Nicaraguan journalist who works for an independent outlet that, according to the documentary, survives largely thanks to international aid. At an editorial meeting, they go over the week's stories: the closure of 15 NGOs, most of them religious institutions, the deportation of two priests, and the refusal to recognize the higher-education degrees of priests and seminarians.

The journalist frames his dilemma this way: how to do journalism without sources, and how to do it when the country you live in "grows longer for you" every day. He says he is just a few meters from Nicaragua, but that for practicing journalism and thinking differently he has to live in exile, like tens of thousands of his compatriots. He directed and wrote a documentary about the persecution of the Church, Sin Dios ni patria (Without God or Homeland). Because the priests didn't want to talk, they had to tell the story another way. Among the images he shows are the police cordon around Bishop Álvarez, the burning by Sandinista fanatics of one of the country's oldest religious images, the Blood of Christ of Managua, and Father Román surrounded inside a church in Masaya.

His own departure was hasty. After the Public Prosecutor's Office summoned him, he fled in a panga, a small boat, and in less than three hours he was in exile once again. His assessment is blunt. There are no journalists left in Nicaragua because the government has de facto outlawed the profession. According to him, it is the only country in the Western Hemisphere without a printed newspaper, because the dictatorship shut it down. He describes the country as "a little North Korea" in Central America.

The ARTE crew entered Nicaragua on tourist visas to contact members of the clergy and worshippers. The narrator notes that in this country of 7 million people, more than 60% of the population is Catholic. Even so, the churches appear silent and empty, as do towns, squares and streets.

According to the testimonies, the situation worsened starting with Holy Week 2022, when the government banned processions. Since then, they say, there have been desecrations of churches, arrests of priests, harassment during Masses, and surveillance and political spying at religious celebrations. They attribute this to the fact that priests were denouncing from the pulpit the abuses of the regime, the police and the paramilitaries.

One testimony reproduces the form the threats take, according to the account. Agents show up at a priest's door for a "courtesy visit" and tell him they don't like the way he's talking and that, if he keeps it up, "there's always jail." The narrator adds that some priests have been arrested right after Mass. Regarding the most recently imprisoned priests, the testimony relays what they themselves say: that they were forced to remain naked in prison and to give statements naked, that they suffered various forms of psychological torture, and that they were prevented from praying aloud or praying with prisoners in neighboring cells.

During the trip, the crew sent out the footage as they went. Asked what can happen to a journalist who tries to cover religious persecution or any other subject critical of the dictatorship, one of the interviewees replies that they will end up in prison, tortured or, "with a lot of luck," deported.

The narrator then recounts his own detention. He was handed over to the police, who checked his identity. On the officers' phones he saw photos of himself and stills from surveillance cameras. He was handcuffed and taken to Managua, a three-hour drive north, to District 3 of the National Police, which he describes as one of the regime's interrogation centers for opponents. Two officials questioned him for hours about the purpose of his trip and every one of his movements. He was held incommunicado and accused of terrorism, facing a possible 25-year sentence.

By his account, the tone soon changed: sleep deprivation, shackles on his hands and feet, a blue prison jumpsuit, and hours standing against a wall, with the same questions over and over. On the second day, he spent five hours standing in front of an officer who pointed a gun at him and insulted him nonstop. The officer was fixated on getting him to inform on the religious figures he had been in contact with, both in Nicaragua and abroad. The next day he was deported to Panama.

In the United States, Molina works for a Texas NGO whose main goal is to help refugees apply for political asylum, and she provides legal assistance to Nicaraguan priests and religious. The documentary shows the preparation for an interview with an immigration officer. The applicant is told they will want to know what harm he has suffered, who caused it and why he is being persecuted, and he is advised to tell only the truth, because "the truth is more than enough." He admits that a refugee's life "isn't that easy."

The priest describes the surveillance he endured. Patrols drove past his house, photographed everyone who walked by and anyone who went inside, and every time he left for the church they took pictures of him. When he finally managed to leave the country, he was accused of being a Vatican spy. According to him, to the regime anyone who thinks differently is a spy, either for the Vatican or for the "Yankee Empire," the two expressions that, in his words, the dictator never stops repeating.

As he was leaving, he was held for a long time, questioned and shown photos that had been taken of him. He was told something he says he will always remember: that he should thank God, "the comandante and the compañera," because at that moment they had no authorization to touch any priest, and that if it were up to the officer, he would only leave there in a black bag or go straight to prison. He says he still hasn't been able to forget the violence, the way they looked at him and how they beat him, and he asks: "Why so much hatred toward the Church?" Molina, for her part, asks priests to get in touch with her team so they can expose what is happening and be "the voice of those who cannot speak."

The narrator argues that the priests' silence is no longer due only to fear, but has become an order from the Vatican. He adds that Pope Francis has rarely spoken about Nicaragua, although in an interview in early 2023 he compared Ortega's regime to Hitler's dictatorship. The documentary also includes an excerpt from a public address by the pope in Italian, in which he encourages the "beloved people of Nicaragua" to renew their hope and asks the Virgin Mary to accompany them.

Asking what is left for Nicaraguan human rights defenders, the documentary follows Molina to the United Nations in Geneva, where she was invited for the first time to speak alongside other exiled compatriots. There she presented the data from her study. Between April 2018 and July 2024, she has documented 870 attacks against the Nicaraguan Catholic Church, and 260 priests, monks and nuns have been forced into exile and made to abandon their pastoral work in the country. She stressed that many of them are Nicaraguan citizens who have also been stripped of their nationality, in violation of the fundamental rights enshrined in Nicaragua's own Constitution.

She closed her remarks with a peasant saying: "Dawn comes, dawn always comes," used to say that better times are ahead. She said that Nicaraguans have not lost hope of deserving better times, but that they know they will not get out of such a difficult, painful and complex situation on their own, and she called for international support in a struggle she defined as a struggle for justice and freedom.

The documentary ends with a song about remembering one's hometown and longing to return to it, without offering any way out of the situation it has just described.