Bishop Báez: officials cited in Human Right Report in Nicaragua must “pay for their crimes”

The group of human rights experts on Nicaragua published a report that identifies dozens of officials who claim are responsible for serious human rights violations, abuse and crimes in the country. In this regard, Bishop Silvio Báez considered, from exile, that they must “pay their crimes.”

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.

“Knowing the names and surnames of those who with brutality and shame have repressed the people of #nicaragua, the requirement of justice is greater and more urgent. Too much pain, humiliation and death have caused,” said Mons. Báez in their X account.

“Each of them must be processed and pay for their crimes”, The prelate stressed.

Félix Maradiaga, a political express and director of the Libertad Foundation, said in Interview with Ewtn News That the report has “234 pages that give overwhelming, precise information about 54 officials who played a bloody role, not only in the 2018 protests, but in subsequent repression.”

In April 2018, the reform of the health and pension system raised protests throughout the country, which were brutally repressed by the police. In them, bishops and priests received death threats.

In the report, Maradiaga continues “appears, for example, the commander in chief of the Army of Nicaragua, General Julio César Avilés, the director of the National Police, first commissioner Francisco Díaz, the vice president of the Supreme Court of Justice Marvin Aguilar and the head of the National Assembly Gustavo Porras, among others.”

“The typology of crimes range from violations to international standards in the matter of the right to nationality, with the arbitrary dispossession of the nationality of more than 435 people, including this server, to much more extreme cases that qualify as crimes against humanity, including torture, forced disappearance.”

Violations “for freedom of expression, violations of religious freedom are also typified and, in addition to this, transnational crime, which is, for example, repression beyond Nicaraguan borders, such as cases in which dissidents or opponents that are already in exile continue to be harassed and persecuted by the Ortega regime”.

Félix Maradiaga then called on the international community, to accompany Nicaragua, so that “a special court can have at some point to pursue these crimes.”

The former presidential candidate also regretted the international isolation to which the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and his wife and “co -president” Rosario Murillo submit to Nicaragua, comparable to countries such as “North Korea, Eritrea, South Sudan or Afghanistan”

The persecution of Nicaragua’s dictatorship against the Catholic Church

“In the specific case of the Catholic Church, which is undoubtedly one of the most persecuted institutions, remember that more than 70% of the Catholic clergy is forced in exile”, which offers “a little hopeful panorama.”

“However, what I have seen is that in the midst of the apparent hopelessness, in the midst of repression, (…) the Church still works in martyrdom and blooms in martyrdom, but that is not what we are going to allow, that is, the fact that the Church has shown such an extraordinary resilience does not mean that the situation is fine.”

After remembering that there are four exiled bishops, such as Mons. Silvio Báez in the United States; And Mons. Rolando Álvarez in Rome, Maradiaga highlighted the need for everyone to know “that in Nicaragua there is a persecuted church.”

The dictatorship of Nicaragua persecutes the Catholic Church with ferocity for some years. The report Nicaragua: a persecuted churchof the researcher Martha Patricia Molina, accounts for 971 attacks of the regime between 2018 and the end of 2024.

“And an equally extreme situation suffers from the press, opposition movements suffer. There are no opposition political parties in Nicaragua that can function freely and therefore the voice of the international community at this time is fundamental,” he concluded.