Anti-Catholic dictator says ‘no more elections’ in Nicaragua

(LifeSiteNews) – Elections are a thing of the past in Nicaragua, the country’s 80-year-old anti-Catholic dictator Daniel Ortega declared over the weekend.

The Guardian reports that Ortega made the announcement at a ceremony for marking the 1979 Sandinista revolution’s 47th anniversary.

“There will be no more elections here so that they [opposition parties] can try to seize the government, seize power,” he said. “We will work with the National Assembly and the relevant institutions on laws, because we need laws that build a wall, a barrier, against the coup plotters and the traitors who sell out their country.”

Elections have already been rendered functionally meaningless, with opposition parties banned and opposing candidates arrested in 2021. But Latin America senior analyst Tiziano Breda of Armed Conflict Location & Event Data said the announcement has “sealed the country’s transition to a full-fledged family dictatorship.”

“Ortega and [his wife and co-president Rosario] Murillo are evidently afraid of the idea that the slightest political opening could create the conditions for dissent to manifest and threaten their grip on power, possibly suggesting that their already feeble domestic support is further falling,” Breda continued. “Therefore, instead of staging a rigged election, they have opted to eliminate electoral competition altogether.”

READ: Nicaragua admits detaining 80-year-old bishop after he prayed for ‘persecuted Church’

The international watchdog group Freedom House deems political rights all but nonexistent and civil liberties not much better in Nicaragua, detailing a steady deterioration of democracy since Ortega came to power.

Last year, the regime empowered the presidency to “coordinate” legislative, judicial, electoral, and oversight bodies; and the regime “shut down or confiscated at least 61 national media outlets since 2007, had stripped 25 journalists of their citizenship, forced 283 into exile, and had imprisoned 15, 4 of whom remained in detention.”

“Authorities continued to crack down on religious freedom including through surveillance of clergy, the confiscation of church properties, and prohibition of religious processions, including Easter processions, which were effectively banned during the year,” the report says. “In September, the NGO Nicaragua Never Again reported that the regime had expelled at least 261 religious figures and closed 1,294 religious organizations since 2018.”

Earlier this month, LifeSiteNews covered the Ortega regime’s arrest of Bishop Juan Abelardo Mata Guevara for several days after reports that the 80-year-old prelate had been arrested following a Mass in which he prayed for the “persecuted Church.” On July 4, the government claimed Guevara had been returned to his home, but no evidence was produced to verify his whereabouts or status, and neither the Diocese of Estelí nor relatives confirmed contact with him.

“The forced disappearance of Bishop Juan Abelardo Mata is a serious matter; this constitutes a crime against humanity committed by agents of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship. He has been missing for 19 days, and the co-dictators have not made any further statements on the matter,” researcher Martha Patricia Molina told EWTN sister outlet ACI Prensa on July 18. “It’s the dictatorship’s practice to inflict the greatest possible harm on priests. No one in his circle has any news of him, and concern among the laity and the Catholic Church in general is even greater due to the medical conditions he suffers from, conditions that are almost certainly not being treated properly.”