A Catholic bishop named Rolando Álvarez remained on an indefinite fast for the seventh straight day on Thursday as part of his protest against persecution by Nicaragua’s communist government, the Latin American news site Infobae reported.
“In a chapel of the Matagalpa Seminary, Monsignor Rolando Álvarez prays and remains on an indefinite fast of ‘water and serum’ since last Thursday, May 19. He will keep [the fast], as he announced it, ‘until the police siege that he suffers ends,'” Infobae reported on May 26.
Álvarez referred to his recent experience with a general “intensification of the repression of the Catholic Church by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, who has blamed the religious for the citizen protests in 2018 against his regime, which he describes as ‘coup d’état’ and ‘terrorism.'”
Álvarez is a Catholic bishop in the Nicaraguan city of Matagalpa who regularly criticizes the Nicaraguan state’s open hostility towards Catholicism. Matagalpa police officers began harassing Álvarez in recent days for undisclosed reasons, though likely in retaliation for his outspoken government criticism. The bishop told Infobae that police officers had surrounded the buildings and churches he frequented and attempted to severely restrict his movement.
“Today I have been persecuted throughout the day by the Sandinista police, from morning until late at night. At all times, during all my movements of the day,” Álvarez said during a social media live stream on May 19.
Infobae, which reviewed the social media footage, described Álvarez as delivering his address “while taking refuge in the Santo Cristo church, in Las Colinas, Managua, which was immediately surrounded by patrols and agents from the police.”
The Argentine news site relayed Álvarez’s recent movement restrictions on May 26, writing:
On Monday morning [May 23], however, the priest managed to leave and return to Matagalpa, according to an effort that Catholic leaders would have carried out with the Nicaraguan Police, Confidencial magazine reported. And on Tuesday [May 24] he officiated at an ordination mass for priests in the northern municipality of San José de Cusmapa.
During the journey from Managua to Matagalpa, about 130 kilometers [80 miles], the bishop was escorted by police patrols that installed a new fence in the Seminary and the Curia of that city.
“Rolando Álvarez was transferred to Matagalpa under heavy police deployment, they did not let him enter his church, he had to go to the Seminary … the ORMU [Ortega-Murillo] regime has violated his right to free movement,” the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights wrote in a Twitter statement posted on May 24.
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