The Nicaraguan dictatorship captured a Catholic school on 29 May and was about to expel three foreign nuns from the Congregation that administers it.
According to local media outlet Mosaico, the regime’s police seized the facilities of the Santa Luisa de Marillac Technical Institute, the only secondary school in the municipality of San Sebastián de Yalí, in the department of Jinotega.
The school, where about 100 students study, is administered by the Congregation of the Daughters of Saint Louise de Marillac in the Holy Spirit, founded in 1992.
“It is a small school, but with a long history and a lot of prestige,” a resident of San Sebastián de Yalí told Mosaico.
According to the Nicaraguan media, the police officers justified the seizure of the school by pointing out that they must review the school’s documentation.
“There are approximately six nuns, including an elderly blind woman. They have been very good, very supportive also with the poor in the neighborhood and they have never had any problems with anyone, because they have been very much of God”, says the resident.
Martha Patricia Molina, a Nicaraguan lawyer, and researcher who lives in exile, told on 31 May that the seizure of the school would be the previous step for its expropriation by the dictatorship.
“In the next few days we will be able to see the order to the Attorney General’s Office to confiscate,” he warned.
“For the dictatorship that always acts arbitrarily, a document establishing the confiscation is not necessary, because all the actions they carry out are already law for them,” lamented the author of the report “Nicaragua, A Persecuted Church?”
The document gives an account of at least 529 attacks committed by the dictatorship against Catholics in the last five years.