Daniel Ortega, the Marxist bully who has turned Nicaragua into a police state, is busy throwing priests in jail and kicking others out of the country for daring to support democracy. As the number of Catholic clergy and laypeople he’s targeting continues to rise, political and religious leaders of all faith traditions must speak out.
Ortega’s troubling track record has been growing for decades. In 1979, the Sandinista regime replaced Nicaragua’s unsavory right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza. Daniel Ortega, a former Communist guerrilla, was its leader and supposedly was creating a workers’ paradise in the Central American republic. Anyone who drew attention to the Sandinista government’s nasty strain of authoritarianism — an unsurprising trait given Ortega’s close ties to Fidel Castro — was dismissed as a reactionary or, later, a tool of the CIA and the Reagan administration that supplied arms to Ortega’s undeniably sinister opponents, the so-called Nicaraguan Contras. We heard a great deal about Sandinista land reforms; less about the savage clearance of indigenous people that made them possible.
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