Nicaraguan 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.
Thank you for posting. Your post reminded me that I wanted to post something “Suejeanne” posted as a comment to a piece on CTH. It is about the fall of Ceausescu. I had heard, but forgotten, the catalyst had to do with moves he was making against a popular religious figure. I didn’t realize all the seeming “miraculous” occurrences that resulted in justice being done to him.
Anyway, here it is
I look at the story of the bring-down of the Ceausescu regime during Christmas in 1989 and it needs to be revisited.
The people of Romania had really been beaten down for years under the Ceausescu regime.
They had gotten to the point though that they were just not going to cower in fear and silence over the impending arrest of a pastor who was going to be taken away. They stood in lines around his apartment block, defying the police to make the arrest. It was as if they had read Solzhenitsyn’s words about “how we burned in the camps, later”.
Ceasescu had been out of town, visiting in Iran . . . when he returned to see this situation of the people refusing to cooperate with the police and keeping the police from arresting the pastor, Ceausescu gave a speech . . . talked in a jolly way about how we all need to go back home to our families and be busy preparing the Christmas feast.
Feast?
Feast! We barely have enough oil to heat our food, we hardly have any food at all, WHAT feast!?
Then things really ramped up and kept going until the Ceasescus decided they had better get out of Dodge . . . do you remember the white hankerchief being waved to the helicopter pilot from the window opening onto a terrace? Then the Ceasescus being half-carried to the helicopter – they were so terrified, the blood had drained from their faces, they were so white . . . I remember seeing how white they looked. They got hoisted up into the helicopter which flew for a while but then had to land in a field. The Ceausescus then had to try to wave down, commandeer a car . . . finally someone came along . . . but then he had car trouble. Then another car and the driver knew a good place at an agricultural college where he could take them to hide for a while until they could sort things out and get help. The driver took the Ceasescus to a building at the college where they could hide . . . he showed them in there where they could rest quietly. Then the driver left, locking the Ceausescus in the room.
Then the trial of the Ceausescus and the execution. In Beijing, their friends were especially horrified at what happened. Why didn’t the Ceausescus use the tunnels? They could have escaped!
So that all “went down” as we used to say, without cell phones, Satellite phones, internet, social media . . . it was a miraculous coalescing that just kept going.
The Last Straw, that’s what the Romanian people had.
Your post 2739 -Has the Pope said anything about this?
In Cuba, the Terminal Stage of Communism Is a Mafia
Regime corruption, economic collapse and public anger point to trouble ahead
https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/in-cuba-the-terminal-stage-of-communism
Excerpt:
.....Though neither the Cuban nor the U.S. government has confirmed it, the raging rumor in Cuba is that Ocana, the Tampa smuggler, worked for Gil. It may be that the latter isn’t being punished for corruption but for being caught at it. That doesn’t alter the awkward fact of Díaz-Canel’s and Marrero Cruz’s participation, however. Their fate, I would think, rests in Raúl Castro’s hands. The old totalitarian’s last ambition should be to die in bed—but one never knows with the Castros. Raúl may wish to take down the men who replaced him at the head of the government and party, in a sort of senile revolutionary Götterdämmerung.
Why are Cuba’s rulers intent on taking their wealth out of the country? The answer should be apparent. For all their power and luxury, these people are terrified of the future. To be a member of the Cuban ruling class is to perform, every day, a high-wire act over an active volcano. Since the courage provided by ideological fervor has dissipated, the only safe move is out.
The wreckage of the Cuban economy really can’t be exaggerated. The perpetual blackouts are an apt symbol of a country that is headed for the dark ages. For the first time since the revolution, Cuba is begging the United Nations for food aid. Nearly half a million persons have fled the island in despair during the last two years—that’s 4% of the population, the equivalent of more than 12 million Americans. Yet the failure cascade is moving faster than the capacity to emigrate. People feel trapped and hopeless. The volcano is growling. Despite the words we use, national economies never actually implode—but the regimes that exploit and mismanage them often do.
Rage and Despair on the Cuban Web
At the same time, the Cuban public has found its voice. That is the second radical transformation of Cuban society. Despite the blackouts and the poor connectivity, large numbers of Cubans are venting online. I have no idea how this happens, but the web in Cuba has turned into an immense chorus of anger and disgust.
The old digital dissidents have a more professional look. Yoani Sánchez, one-time blogmother to a tiny sect of online Cubans, presently runs “14ymedio,” a news site indispensable to anyone looking for reliable information about the country. The tone of the site is measured but unquestionably anti-regime.
Yamil Cuéllar, we have seen, can put together high-quality investigative documentaries, posted on YouTube, in which his contempt for the system is expressed in earthy Cubanisms. Cuéllar’s relentless attacks on the government and predictions of its imminent fall make one wonder: Why is this man not in prison? The most likely answer, once again, is a crisis of nerve at the top. Regime enforcers don’t want to be caught striking the wrong pose when the volcano blows.
Most moving are the expressions of little-known individuals trapped in the catastrophe of a failed utopia, trying to make sense of the nightmare of everyday life. Those unable to flee Cuba today escape to the web. They post on Facebook and X, they exchange links and opinions on WhatsApp, they complain of the dark and the heat and the mosquitos at night, they mock the regime, they pray to God for consolation. “How lucky we Cubans are that we can go to the web!” reads a Facebook post. “That’s the end of the state monopoly over information!” During a blackout, one poster asks, “Where can we protest?” Another answers: “Right here.”
Cynicism toward the authorities is absolute. “They’re trying to do damage control and offer Alejandro Gil’s head on a silver platter.” “This was a plan, this wasn’t about errors, this was a plan to destroy from within everything we had believed and built.” Amid a volley of emojis, one wag claimed on Facebook that the words of the communist anthem, the “Internationale,” had been written about Cubans: “Arise, wretched of the earth, stand up you slaves without bread ...”
Once the jokes and the defiance stop, we are confronted with the awful spectacle of human existence in a state of pure desperation. “Of course I’m unwell with blackouts of 15 hours one day and eight hours the next. I feel dissociated, I’m not well. I think I’m entering into insanity,” a woman wrote. A poster warned: “This can’t continue indefinitely.”
If, for the moment, the internet in Cuba is a refuge, it takes little imagination to see how it can become a mustering-place for revolt as has transpired elsewhere. Spontaneous protests, captured and transmitted via cellphone video, recently erupted in Santiago de Cuba, Bayamo and other cities in the east of the country. Unrest still simmers as of this moment. All that’s needed is a single mobilizing incident: a spark sufficient to ignite the conflagration.
Meanwhile, dominos will continue to fall. In Tampa, there will be a verdict in the Ocana case and a public report from U.S. authorities, naming names. The purge will resume its erratic progress, snaring officials below, sideways and possibly above Alejandro Gil, as the regime proceeds to devour itself. Gil will be convicted out of his own mouth—probably of taking money from the CIA, so the historic monstrosity that is the Cuban economy can be blamed on “the enemy.” The constellation of political and economic forces that make possible Cuéllar’s Cienfuegos mafia will lose substance, wobble and fade like a hallucination.
Karl Marx taught that the final stage of socialism is communism. We have learned from the evidence of Cuba that the terminal stage of communism is a heedless gangsterism. After that, the deluge.