Nicaragua: Daniel Ortega mocks Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, the bishop who rejected exile is sent to prison

The Nicaraguan bishop Rolando Álvarez Lagos, very critical of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, was transferred from his residence, where he had been under house arrest since August 2022, to the National Penitentiary System, known as the Nicaraguan Model Prison.

This was announced this Thursday by the Nicaraguan dictator during a national radio and television broadcast in which he stated that Monsignor Álvarez was included in the list of prisoners from that country who were released and expelled this Thursday to the United States, but that he refused.

According to Ortega, Monsignor Álvarez was transferred by police agents from his house in Managua to the Air Force field, where a private plane from the United States was ready to take 224 "of what they call political prisoners."

The Sandinista leader said that the bishop was queuing, but before going up the stairs of the plane, he began to say that he would not get on, because he "would first have to talk to the bishops."

"He demands to speak with the bishops, a meeting with the bishops," criticized Ortega, who remarked that the decision to expel the group of prisoners "is a decision of the Nicaraguan State," which cannot be "questioned."

"I don't know what this man (Álvarez) thinks that, faced with a decision by the Nicaraguan State, he says that he does not abide by a resolution of a state power that is ordering him to leave the country," he reproached.

The other prisoner who did not want to get on the plane is Fanor Alejandro Ramos, 50, because, in addition to crimes considered "treason," he is imprisoned for drug storage and illegal possession of weapons. "Surely (Ramos) was afraid that once he was in the United States, and with that background, they would investigate him and lock him up in the jail there and end up in life imprisonment or in the electric chair," Ortega argued.

In marked contrast with Monsignor Álvarez attitude, Ortega said, a group of 11 religious, including priests who were also imprisoned, did board the plane and are already in Washington. The dictator explained that they could not force Monsignor Álvarez to get on the plane because part of the agreement with the US authorities was that the Nicaraguan prisoners had to get on the plane of their own free will.

The dictator said that instead of taking him home, where "he has been treated in an incredible way, like nobody else in this country," they transferred him to the Modelo prison, a maximum security prison located on the outskirts of Managua, because " he is an ordinary man. The habit does not make the monk".

The 56-year-old religious man was accused in December by the Prosecutor's Office of the crimes of conspiracy "to attack national integrity and propagation of false news" through the media and social networks.

Álvarez was taken from the episcopal palace at dawn on August 19 by law enforcement officers, along with priests, seminarians, and lay people, after being forcibly locked up in his residence for 15 days, accused of trying to "organize violent groups."

Ortega has branded as "terrorists" the Nicaraguan bishops who acted as mediators of a national dialogue that sought a peaceful solution to the crisis that the country has been experiencing since April 2018.