Good Friday Procession, Seville, Spain Good Friday Procession, Seville, SpainNicaraguan dictatorship deploys 4,000 police to prevent Holy Week processions
Translated excerpt:
About four thousand police officers were deployed this Holy Week around Catholic temples in Nicaragua to prevent religious processions from taking place in the streets, while the regime promotes activities under the guise of “popular traditions” through the Tourism Institute, the Police, and municipal authorities.
Around 400 parishes in the country received police notifications prohibiting them from taking to the streets with the traditional religious processions of Holy Week, as explained by lawyer Martha Patricia Molina, who has dedicated the last few years to investigating and exposing the persecution suffered by the Catholic Church in Nicaragua.
The police deployment was calculated by Molina according to the number of agents reported in each parish in the country.
According to Molina, around 4800 religious activities that were traditionally held in the streets of towns and cities are not taking place this year, and some parishes have decided to hold their celebrations inside or around the churches, where they are still allowed to hold activities.
The researcher says that the police notifications received by the priests do not explain the reasons for the prohibitions and merely express “non-authorization” for events in the way they were traditionally held.
On Sunday, March 24, Palm Sunday in the Catholic celebration, there was an increase in police and paramilitary surveillance at the temples. “At least two police officers were in each church, and in some churches, several patrols with Special Operations agents arrived,” says Molina.
The police seek to intimidate the parishioners with their presence and the taking of photographs, she says.
Journalist Miguel Mendoza reported on his X account that the Nicaraguan police captured four young people who had disguised themselves as Jews to visit neighboring houses as part of Holy Week traditions. Mendoza stated that the capture was carried out with a show of violence, and as of this Friday, the young people had not been released.
The Daniel Ortega regime maintains an offensive against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which, from April 2018, when massive citizen protests occurred, until January of last year, recorded 812 attacks, according to the count kept by lawyer Martha Patricia Molina in her report “A Persecuted Church.”
These attacks include imprisonments, physical assaults, expulsions from the country, desecrations of religious rites and symbols, and exiles of priests, laity, bishops, and nuns, among others.
Church of the Assumption, Lake Bled, Julian Alps, Slovenia