Holy Week 2025 in Nicaragua: Dictatorship of Ortega and Murillo again ban processions

The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in Nicaragua has banned, for the third consecutive year, processions in the streets of the country, where the Catholic Church suffers a fierce persecution by the regime for some years.

“Before we went to the streets and made a tour of the communities, now no longer. We have to do it inside the temple, and that a bit of popular religiosity, because people liked the procession. Now, we just pray and read the stations,” he tells the newspaper Confidential A faithful name Marcos, which serves in a church in Managua.

Aurelio, 35, points out in turn: “We already know who are the ones who arrive as a civilian, there were recently a kermés and there we saw them. They take photos, come who they are and what is being done. The priest must provide information.”

According to the aforementioned newspaper, the dictatorship would put 14,000 police officers in the streets to avoid processions in the Holy Week of Nicaragua.

At the end of March, Martha Patricia Molina, Nicaraguan investigator and lawyer in exile, explained that there is a police summer plan “, which” includes the siege and intimidation of police officers to priests “to remind them two orders that must be fulfilled so as not to end in jail: “The non -authorization to carry out processions” and “not mention in their homilies and religious activities nothing against the ‘government.”

Molina is the author of the report Nicaragua: a persecuted churchwhich in its last edition accounts for almost 1,000 attacks of the dictatorship against the Catholic Church in the country between 2018 and 2024.

In the middle of that month, the Mosaic newspaper CSI denounced that the police monitor priests, review their cell phones and demand weekly reports of their activities, in addition to restricting them freedom of movement.

Nicaragua’s dictatorship cannot prevent “the crucified from revealing his victory”

Yesterday, Domingo de Ramos, Mons. Silvio Báez, Nicaraguan Bishop in exile, wrote in his X account that “the #nicaragua dictatorship has banned processions on the street. What they cannot prevent is that The crucified reveals his victory in each struggle for truth and justicein each effort to defend the dignity of people and in each act of solidarity by the victims ”.

On April 13, Fr. Nils Hernández, an exiled Nicaraguan priest who works in the Queen of Peace parish, of the Archdiocese of Dubuque, Iowa (United States), said that “Jesus will overthrow those dictators They have stolen Nicaragua like his farm. God looks at the suffering of his people and God does not abandon Nicaragua, although the co -let (Ortega and Murillo) think that they will continue to triumph. “

“Despite the religious persecution undertaken by orteguism against the Church in #Nicaragua, Catholics massively attend the country’s parishes at this beginning of the #weeksAnta2025,” said the Nicaraguan journalist exiled in Spain, Israel Espinoza. “The faith of Nicaraguan Christians is worthy of admiration and solidarity“He added.

Fr. Edwing Román, another exiled priest, wrote in X that “In Nicaragua nothing is normal. I know some parishes where police remain within the temple, they record homilies, and they ask to take pictures with the priest to compromise them to give an image according to the chayo (Rosario Murillo), of “Love and Peace.”

UN Report on Nicaragua

On April 3, the group of human rights experts on Nicaragua published the report entitled Institutions and people responsible for the main patterns of human rights violations and abuses and crimes perpetrated in Nicaragua since April 2018a 234 -page text that gives information about 54 officials to whom they consider responsible.

Félix Maradiaga, a political express and director of the Libertad Foundation, said April 10, in Interview with Ewtn News That the report details the “bloody role” of those officials, “not only in the protests of 2018, but in subsequent repression”, and launched a call to the international community, to accompany Nicaragua, so that “a special court can have at some point to pursue these crimes.”