Managua: In Nicaragua, Christians are persecuted. Bishops and priests 'set into' house arrested. The Missionaries of Charity expelled. How did the Central American country come to such a crisis?. There is a historical story behind the persecution, killing and violation of fundamental rights of Christians in Nicaragua, a country with a totalitarian regime.

This story begins in 1979 with the overthrow of the dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty and the first Sandinista government that led Nicaragua from then until 1990. And 40 years later, the hostilities and persecutions repeat themselves.

On July 19, 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a leftist guerrilla group, overthrew Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the third and last member of the so-called Somocista dynasty — following his father, Anastasio Somoza García, and his brother, Luis Somoza Debayle — who had ruled the country since 1937.

In November 1979, the Nicaraguan Bishops' Conference published a pastoral letter titled "Christian Commitment for a New Nicaragua" that, among other things, saw this "revolutionary process" as an opportunity for the country and called on the population to make the necessary sacrifices and to experience a "profound conversion of heart."

The bishops also called for "ample space for freedom allowing it (the Church) to carry out its apostolic work without interference."

Shortly after Somoza's fall, a five-member National Reconstruction Governing Junta was established: three from the FSLN and two independents, including Violeta Chamorro (widow of Pedro Chamorro, director of the newspaper La Prensa, who was assassinated by Somoza) and Alfonso Robelo. The coordinator was Daniel Ortega.

Violeta Chamorro resigned from the Junta in April 1980 due to the socialist direction the FSLN was taking and the influence of Cuba in the government. Robelo resigned for the same reasons and later joined the political directorate of the Nicaraguan Resistance (called the "Contras" for "counterrevolutionaries") that, financed by the United States, fought a civil war with the Sandinistas throughout the decade.

The Junta governed Nicaragua until 1985 and handed over power to Ortega, who had won the 1984 presidential elections with the FSLN, which had become a political party.

With the inauguration of the Junta, three well-known priests who promoted Marxist liberation theology assumed positions in the Sandinista government: Miguel D'Escoto was minister of foreign affairs (1979-1990); Ernesto Cardenal was minister of culture (1979-1987); and Edgar Parrales was vice minister deputy director general of the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute (1979-1980), minister of social welfare (1980-1982) and Nicaraguan ambassador to the Organization of American States (1982-1986).

The participation of these priests in the government caused tensions with the bishops. Although the episcopate initially authorized this participation, in January 1980 the bishops' conference decided that they could no longer be part of the Sandinista government.

In April of that year, Pope John Paul II received the Nicaraguan bishops at the Vatican and told them in an address that "an atheist ideology cannot be the guiding instrument of the effort to promote social justice, because it deprives man of his freedom, of spiritual inspiration, and of the strength to love his brother, which has its most solid and operative foundation in the love of God."

A few weeks later, the bishops asked the priests to resign from their positions in the Sandinista government, but they refused.

In February 1984, John Paul II suspended ad divinis the three priests and Father Fernando Cardenal, Ernesto's brother, who also participated in the Ortega regime. From that year until 1990, Fernando Cardenal was minister of education.

During the first Sandinista period, one of the members of the Catholic Church who stood out for his denunciations of human-rights violations was the archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo (1926-2018), whom John Paul II made a cardinal in 1985.

The archbishop was already known for denouncing human-rights violations during the Somoza dictatorship and didn't remain silent in the face of the abuses of the Ortega regime.

In addition, his role was decisive in preventing the spread of the so-called "people's church" promoted by priests and religious subscribing to Marxist liberation theology.

The FSLN government retaliated and targeted prominent pastors. In August 1982, agents from the regime dressed as police officers arrested Father Bismarck Carballo, who was then a spokesman for the Church and the director of a Catholic radio station.

The agents entered a house where the priest was and fabricated an alleged sexual scandal with a woman. They stripped him naked, took him out on the street, and published the false story in all the official media.

In February 1986, the U.S. secretary of state published the testimony of former Sandinista lieutenant Álvaro Baldizón Avilés, a defector who stated that the scandal involving Carballo was staged by the Ortega regime.

Another of Ortega's outrages against the Church was the expulsion of 10 foreign priests in July 1984. The priests were accused of violating national laws and participating in anti-government activities for attending a march called by Obando y Bravo in solidarity with Father Luis Amado Peña, a priest accused of terrorism by the regime.