No place sacred

When visitors show up at Raul Zamora’s Church of Divine Mercy in Managua, what they see shocks them. Bullets have left baseball-size holes in the tabernacle windows. Gunfire punctured the panes that let in light near an altar and pockmarked the walls. An oil-painted image of Christ bears three bullet holes.

Parishioners have swept the floor of glass and debris, but they asked Father Zamora to leave unrepaired the damaged imagery and panes with their gaping holes and spidery veins of broken glass—a lasting testament to a 15-hour siege in July. “Our church has become a sign of governmental repression but also of hope for Nicaraguans since many lives were saved in the attack,” Zamora said.

Zamora had no intention of making his church the flash point in a mounting crisis in this Central American nation. Slight of build, quiet-spoken, and wearing glasses, Zamora also did not see himself taking sides in a street revolt that’s turned into a deadly crackdown and the largest uprising in Nicaragua since civil war ended nearly three decades ago.

Volunteers clean up after the attack on the church. Alfredo Zuniga/AP

Human rights monitors estimate between 300 to 500 Nicaraguans have been killed in what began as protests in April over social security reforms set to cut pensions. President Daniel Ortega responded by dispatching masked paramilitary units into the streets, along with police backed by heavy weapons. The protesters, rather than caving to the heavy-handed response, dug in, forming barricades, firing homemade mortars at police, and increasing their demands.

The protesters called for Ortega to step aside and allow for new elections. The former Sandinista leader, who battled U.S.-backed Contra rebels in the 1980s and ruled the country from 1979 to 1990, won election in 2006 and abolished term limits in 2014, potentially making himself president for life with his wife Rosario Murillo serving as vice president.

Despite widespread and ongoing street unrest, the protesters have proved no match for Ortega’s militants. Besides the hundreds killed, more than 2,000 Nicaraguan civilians have been injured and hundreds are in jail or have simply disappeared. More than 23,000 Nicaraguans have fled south to neighboring Costa Rica, which by mid-August showed signs of itself fraying in what could become a regional crisis.

Few understand the deadly force unleashed by Ortega as Zamora does. For months the Catholic Church sought to broker a dialogue between demonstrators and the Ortega regime. Instead, the church has become a target in the government’s crackdown.

Nicaraguan police pose with Ortega on July 13. Cristobal Venegas/AP

In early July Zamora noticed a drone flying over his church during Mass. Then he began to see drones flying over Managua’s National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN), a sprawling campus adjoining the Church of Divine Mercy where student protesters had set up barricades of brick and barbed wire. Few had firearms, and most had rocks or homemade mortars or simply waved flags. But UNAN became one of the last strongholds for protesters in the capital, and on July 13 paramilitary units closed in, opening fire on the students, most of them 17- and 18-year-olds. Fearing for their lives, some used their cell phones to call Zamora.

“The university is under my pastoral care,” Zamora explained. “I know many of them personally and attend to their spiritual care. Of course I told them to come to the church.”

When students began arriving wounded, Zamora and others on the church staff quickly saw the urgency of rescuing others, and made multiple trips to the UNAN campus using parish cars to ferry students to safety. As darkness fell, Zamora’s rectory became a triage center with blood on the floor. The church filled with about 200 students, many with serious bullet wounds, including one medical student who had been treating others on campus when she took a bullet in the leg, breaking her femur. Volunteers carried her into the church with her leg in a cardboard splint.

Zamora believed students would be safe inside Divine Mercy, but soon the paramilitary units swarmed the area. They cut off the only exit out of the church and opened fire on the compound, including the church building and Zamora’s rectory. The gunfire would continue all night.

Trapped inside, Zamora noted, were students who were Catholic and Protestant, and some who were atheists. Also trapped was Washington Post reporter Joshua Partlow, who described the scene in the church as “the hectic, confused energy of a field hospital run mostly by non-doctors.”

Partlow also recorded how Zamora and his assistant—with paramilitaries directing fire at the church and the adjoining university—got on their cell phones to Catholic leaders in Nicaragua. And prayed.

“Lord, we ask you to protect us in this moment,” Zamora said as he huddled with students under the crack of gunfire outside. “We believe in you, Lord, those of us who have no strength against this great army.”

Archbishop Sommertag (right) talks with journalists after Cardinal Brenes (left) negotiated for the safe transfer of students out of the Divine Mercy church. Alfredo Zuniga/AP

Working through the night to secure the students’ release, the church leaders—Archbishop of Nicaragua Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag and Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes—by morning arrived at Divine Mercy to negotiate an end to the siege. (The U.S. State Department with the Catholic clergy negotiated a middle-of-the-night release for Partlow and several wounded students.) But two students had been killed in the overnight shooting and about 16 injured.

“This is a moment when the Church gives witness and really shines forth the face of Christ in us,” Zamora told Catholic News Agency after the siege ended. “If the cross is not in our life, if we are not willing to suffer for love, then our religion just stays as something that is exterior. Just trying to do what is ritually appropriate. Our faith starts when we have that deep conviction in Jesus and His message.”

But the end of the siege—which had received national and international attention—did not end the crisis. One month later Zamora told me by email, “The situation in Nicaragua has gotten more complicated. There is currently a persecution going on in the whole country.”

In the days following the students’ release, Zamora would learn that several of them had disappeared. He and other clergy went jail to jail and found and secured the release of some students, but many remained unaccounted for, he said.

PRESIDENT ORTEGA after the siege abruptly changed tactics. Church leaders he treated as mediators he now called “terrorists,” accusing them of an alliance with opponents wanting to overthrow the government. In a July 19 speech on the 39th anniversary of the Sandinista victory over the Anastasio Somoza regime, Ortega told thousands of supporters that churches had been used “as bases to attack and assassinate,” and said, “The opposition is in league with Satan, and the bishops should exorcise them.”

A new anti-terrorism law enacted at the end of July expanded the government’s ability to arrest and sentence to up to 20 years in prison anyone participating in a “situation of armed conflict” or destroying private or public property. Opponents warned it could be used to criminalize protesters, but also to target members of churches and nongovernmental organizations providing humanitarian aid. In what Ortega called a “clean sweep,” paramilitaries used machinery and heavy artillery to remove barricades and round up protesters in what witnesses say was a brutal campaign that left hundreds dead.

Anyone carrying out charity work in the midst of the crisis suddenly has become suspect. Authorities have targeted health workers suspected of treating protesters—dismissing at least 135 doctors and nurses who work at public hospitals across Nicaragua, according to Human Rights Watch.

Churches and affiliated organizations also have been vulnerable to government sweeps, targeting teachers and other caregivers who work in areas where police and paramilitary units have destroyed barricades and rounded up protesters.

“It’s really very difficult because the government has made us enemies when we are not, and they know we are not,” said Zamora. Police have continued to threaten priests with arrest and kidnapping, Zamora said, and have entered places of worship and in some cases destroyed church property.

A student who had taken refuge at the church embraces a relative after his release. Cristobal Venegas/AP

In broad daylight on Aug. 20 a group of paramilitaries kidnapped Carlos Cárdenas, legal adviser of the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua. Cárdenas was at his home on the outskirts of Managua with his wife and 10-year-old daughter. The hooded assailants threatened to kill his daughter unless Cárdenas left with them. The Episcopal Conference had joined Catholic clergy as one of the principal mediators between the Ortega government and protest leaders.

NICARAGUA’S POPULATION is approximately 58 percent Catholic and about one-third evangelical, according to Operation World. The crisis extends beyond Managua and Catholic leaders, with other churches and affiliated organizations affected also.

At the evangelical Nicaragua Christian Academy (NCA) in Matagalpa, 80 miles north of Managua, classes began this summer with 15 percent of the student body missing. Some had left the country with their families, or parents were afraid to send them to school. One teacher had to leave Nicaragua after falling under suspicion for praying at protest sites.

Parents and other relatives have been caught in the Ortega dragnet, too. A school parent was arrested at a march in Matagalpa on Aug. 18 that one resident described as “completely peaceful.” The resident, who spoke to me on condition that he not be named due to security concerns, said within blocks of the downtown protest starting, a paramilitary shot to death a protester.

“Our gate is locked and we are on high alert, not letting anyone on campus,” said Greg Kynast, an American who serves as director of NCA, which runs a program for students from pre-kindergarten through high school. The school year in Nicaragua typically runs from February to November, and Kynast said school days since April have been “really tense.”

At the height of protests—with fuel shortages and routes to the school blocked by barricades—many classes were moved online or to a satellite campus that students reached by crossing a narrow pedestrian swing bridge over a river to avoid clashes. Despite extra security, explosions from mortars nearby and gunfire isn’t uncommon. “We’re not unused to seeing guns on the street, but these are assault weapons,” Kynast said.

Like NCA, other Christian-based organizations I contacted said they plan to soldier on, though they are taking new precautions to avoid danger and many want to avoid appearances of opposing the government.

With a crackdown on dissent appearing to be the country’s new normal, protesters now decry the Ortega regime’s moves to deny Nicaraguans the safety of churches. But Ortega’s Sandinistas have cracked down on religious groups before. In the 1980s, when the Soviet Union backed the revolution, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) sent communist spies into churches to search out opponents. Missionaries and foreign-based church organizations were largely banned from the country. That changed under Violeta Chamorro, who defeated Ortega in 1990 elections and succeeded in bringing an end to the Contra War.

Ortega lost two more presidential elections before winning in 2006. While outwardly discarding Marxist ideology to become the dominant party, the FSLN under Ortega has gradually realigned itself with Russia, along with China and Iran. Not surprisingly, it also has moved the country toward a more authoritarian regime.

“If Ortega-Murillo regime in #Nicaragua gets a big loan from #Russia to bail them out of crisis they created, it will confirm what I have been arguing for some time,” tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., on Aug. 20. “Ortega is [Vladimir Putin’s] closest supporter in Latin America & therefore a national security risk to U.S. we must address.”

At a meeting of the Organization of American States on Aug. 22, U.S. Ambassador Carlos Trujillo said the United States was prepared to explore “all possible sanctions” against the Ortega government and called for the reinstatement of the national dialogue. He left unclear whether the United States would press for Catholic and Episcopal leaders to be reinstated as part of that dialogue.

Zamora has remained in Managua but said few parishioners are coming to his church, and he is not sleeping at the Church of Divine Mercy rectory: “It’s too dangerous.”