WASHINGTON — The Catholic Church’s “structure and unified character” are “particularly troubling” for the dictatorial Ortega-Murillo regime in Nicaragua, said Felix Maradiaga, Freedom House trustee and exiled Nicaraguan human-rights activist, to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

USCIRF held a virtual hearing on Wednesday to discuss religious persecution in Nicaragua. A panel of witnesses to the humanitarian crises taking place in the Central American nation spoke on their experiences to the commission.

Maradiaga said the regime “resents” the Catholic Church’s support for the faithful amid the dictatorship’s human-rights violations.

“The attacks against the Church are not based on an explicit attempt to promote atheism, but rather an obsessive attempt to subjugate and manipulate the fate of Nicaragua,” Maradiaga said.

Maradiaga endured imprisonment for 611 days (about one year and eight months) for opposing the socialist Sandinista National Liberation Front. Maradiaga said prisoners faced forced nudity and complete isolation and were not allowed to have a Bible or pray together during the first year of imprisonment.

Maradiaga cited multiple examples of religious repression in Nicaragua, including the Nicaraguan Department of the Interior’s June 9 revocation of Catholic station Radio Maria’s license, one of many attacks on Nicaraguan media outlets. He also mentioned the shutting down of more than120 religious organizations, the expulsion of 84 priests and 70 nuns from the country, and prohibitions of religious orders.

“USCIRF is greatly concerned that the Nicaraguan government continues to intensely persecute Catholic, evangelical and Indigenous religious communities,” Maureen Ferguson, one of the USCIRF’s six commissioners, said in an exclusive statement to the Register.

According to the USCIRF’s 2024 Annual Report, “The Ortega-Murillo regime continued to systematically target religious organizations it viewed as opponents, particularly Catholic charitable and educational organizations.” It also reports that Ortega and Murillo have referred to the Church as a “mafia” and have called priests “representatives of the devil.”

The government also sentenced Nicaraguan Bishop Rolando Álvarez to serve 26 years in prison in February 2023 for denouncing the government.

“We must not mistake the silence imposed by the regime for signs of normalcy,” Maradiaga said. “Anyone who voices opposition to the routine risks having their family in Nicaragua face repression.”

Maradiaga also discussed the Sandinista regime’s manipulation of the Catholic faith in Nicaragua. He used the example of the regime’s attempt to involve the Catholic Church in a program, Zero Hunger, to distribute food for political party promotion, with which the Church refused to participate.

Ortega and Murillo’s attempts to “co-op the Catholic Church” with religious rhetoric have failed, further fueling their “hatred of the Church,” according to Maradiaga.

“While the persecution against the Catholic Church is particularly severe, our brothers and sisters of the Moravian and evangelical churches also face persecution,” Maradiaga said at the hearing.

Panelist Jon Britton Hancock leads Mountain Gateway, an evangelical discipleship and relief ministry. In 2023, Nicaraguan police arrested and convicted 11 of Mountain Gateway’s pastors on false money-laundering charges. The pastors face 12-15 years in prison and were each fined $80 million.

“Sadly, our situation is the latest example of religious persecution by the Ortega-Murillo regime. They target anyone they see as a threat to their grip on Nicaragua,” Britton Hancock said.

According to Britton Hancock, government informants monitor church services, and pastors who preach against the Sandinista movement can face penalties ranging from surveillance to imprisonment.

The Ortega regime targets religious communities not because of their beliefs, but because it perceives organized groups as potentially dangerous political actors, according to Christopher Hernandez-Roy, the deputy director and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who also spoke as part of the panel.

“You have to keep in mind that this is a paranoid dictatorship, in the sense that it’s completely unrestrained, and it desires to stamp out any and all possible form of dissent,” he said. “And therefore, any group that’s organized is immediately a target of the regime.”

Britton Hancock responded to Hernandez-Roy, saying the inability to voice his religious convictions to the government is religious oppression.

Britton Hancock said, “Love can have no coercion in it, and there must be freedom for that to exist, giving rise to freedom of thought, freedom of response, freedom of speech and all those basic things — so is it not religious persecution? I think there’s no way to separate it.”

Ferguson told the Register the USCIRF urges Congress to pass the Restoring Sovereignty and Human Rights in Nicaragua Act of 2024, which “expands the U.S. government’s ability to sanction Nicaraguan government officials” and mandates the U.S. support the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua.