In February, 222 political dissidents who had been either in prison or house arrest in Nicaragua arrived in the United States, having accepted exile as a condition of their release. One opponent of President Daniel Ortega’s regime refused the deal: Rolando Álvarez, the 56-year-old bishop of Matagalpa, a large town 80 miles northeast of Managua, who had been under house arrest since August. The government promptly declared him guilty of treason and sentenced him to 26 years. He also was stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship.
History records many instances in which religious leaders, including those of the Roman Catholic Church, have resisted the abuses of temporal authority, and have been persecuted for it. Not since Communist Hungary tortured and jailed Cardinal József Mindszenty in the early Cold War, however, has a dictatorship borne down on a single cleric with something like the ferocity Mr. Ortega is visiting upon Bishop Álvarez, whose activism began by opposing ecologically destructive mining projects and expanded to include protests against the government’s human rights violations in general.
The persecution of Bishop Álvarez is part of a systematic campaign of repression against the Nicaraguan church, whose leaders have often tried to protect pro-democracy activists and mediate between them and the Ortega regime. An estimated 50 religious leaders have fled the country since nationwide protests, and a retaliatory government crackdown, in 2018. Just last year, two congregations of nuns, including Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity, were expelled. Repression of the church is of a piece with the regime’s efforts to crush secular civil society organizations, including 40 shut down since December, according to a March 3 United Nations report. That same report, by Assistant Secretary General for Human Rights Ilze Brands Kehris, accuses Nicaragua of other “serious human rights violations,” including holding 37 political prisoners and summarily stripping 94 “traitors to the homeland” of their nationality and assets.
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End of carousel- D.C. Council reverses itself on school resource officers. Good.
- Virginia makes a mistake by pulling out of an election fraud detection group.
- Vietnam sentences another democracy activist.
- Biden has a new border plan.
The D.C. Council voted on Tuesday to stop pulling police officers out of schools, a big win for student safety. Parents and principals overwhelmingly support keeping school resource officers around because they help de-escalate violent situations. D.C. joins a growing number of jurisdictions, from Montgomery County, Md., to Denver, in reversing course after withdrawing officers from school grounds following George Floyd’s murder. Read our recent editorial on why D.C. needs SROs.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) just withdrew Virginia from a data-sharing consortium, ERIC, that made the commonwealth’s elections more secure, following Republicans in seven other states in falling prey to disinformation peddled by election deniers. Former GOP governor Robert F. McDonnell made Virginia a founding member of ERIC in 2012, and until recently conservatives touted the group as a tool to combat voter fraud. D.C. and Maryland plan to remain. Read our recent editorial on ERIC.
In Vietnam, a one-party state, democracy activist Tran Van Bang was sentenced on Friday to eight years in prison and three years probation for writing 39 Facebook posts. The court claimed he had defamed the state in his writings, according to Radio Free Asia. In the past six years, at least 60 bloggers and activists have been sentenced to between 4 and 15 years in prison under the law, Human Rights Watch found. Read more of the Editorial Board’s coverage on autocracy and Vietnam.
The Department of Homeland Security has provided details of a plan to prevent a migrant surge along the southern border. The administration would presumptively deny asylum to migrants who failed to seek it in a third country en route — unless they face “an extreme and imminent threat” of rape, kidnapping, torture or murder. Critics allege that this is akin to an illegal Trump-era policy. In fact, President Biden is acting lawfully in response to what was fast becoming an unmanageable flow at the border. Read our most recent editorial on the U.S. asylum system.
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A positive result of Bishop Álvarez’s imprisonment was to shock Pope Francis out of his reluctance to speak forthrightly about the Ortega regime. Perhaps out of an abundance of diplomatic caution, the pope had previously limited himself to vague expressions of concern even after another senior bishop and the Vatican ambassador were ousted last year. After Mr. Ortega referred to the Vatican as a “mafia,” and imprisoned Bishop Álvarez, the Holy Father blasted Managua as “a communist dictatorship in 1917 or a Hitlerian one in 1935.” Thereafter, the regime suspended diplomatic relations with the Vatican, which, on March 18, closed its embassy in Managua.
Though an improvement over appeasement, the pope’s confrontational posture is not necessarily more likely to bring about change in Managua, where the regime continues to enjoy the backing of its own police and military, as well as Cuba, Venezuela and Russia. To be sure, the prisoner release in February probably showed that U.S. economic pressure was having some effect, but it’s unclear that stronger measures would get more results without inflicting collateral damage on the second-poorest population in the Western Hemisphere. A March 22 joint hearing of two House Foreign Affairs subcommittees included strong bipartisan denunciation of the regime, especially its treatment of Bishop Álvarez. Keeping this brave man’s name before the public may not be sufficient to liberate Nicaragua, but it is necessary.