John Kirby, Coordinator of the National Security Council for Strategic Communications at the White House, assured that the persecution of the Nicaraguan dictatorship against Catholic leaders in Nicaragua is unacceptable.
“There has been a dramatic deterioration in respect for democratic principles and human rights by the Ortega-Murillo regime,” Kirby noted.
These human rights violations include, John Kirby continued, “the harassment and imprisonment of democratic leaders, members of opposition political parties, religious leaders, as you rightly say, including the Catholic Church, students and journalists.”
“All of this is unacceptable. We condemn these actions,” Kirby stressed, as reported by EWTN News Nightly.
“We have already taken various actions to promote the Ortega-Murillo regime to take responsibility for its actions, including the imposition of sanctions, and we will continue to do so,” concluded the Coordinator of the National Security Council for Strategic Communications at the White House.
In the last five years, there have been at least 529 attacks by Ortega against the Church, and 90 of them were committed so far in 2023, according to the report “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church?”
One of the latest actions of the persecution has been the freezing of the accounts of the dioceses and parishes in Nicaragua, which the dictatorship accuses of money laundering, an accusation that human rights defenders describe as something “ridiculous.”