On the evening of Thursday 17 July, armed police officers – some in uniform and others dressed in black or blue and with their faces covered – arrived in a coordinated operation at the homes of Pastor Rudy Palacios Vargas and several of his friends and family in Jinotepe Municipality, Carazo Department, Nicaragua.
The police, who did not show any arrest warrants, broke down the doors of each house using their rifle butts and a tool called a ‘pig’s foot’ before proceeding to arrest Pastor Palacios Vargas, his sister Jéssica Palacios Vargas and brothers-in-law Pedro José López and Armando José Bermudez. Mauricio Alonso Petri, a political activist and friend of the pastor, and his adult son of the same name, who is a part of the worship team at Pastor Palacios Vargas’ church were detained as well. Family friend Olga María Lara Rojas, a former political councillor, who is a Protestant Christian but not a member of Pastor Palacios Vargas’ church, was also arrested at her home.
The officers confiscated the detainees’ cell phones and other electrical devices and were reported to have taken them to the 3rd Police District, though the authorities initially refused to provide their family members with any information as to their whereabouts.
On 28 July the Nicaraguan news outlet 100% Noticias reported that the group had been transferred to ‘La Granja’ (the farm), a notoriously overcrowded prison in Granada Department. Pastor Palacios Vargas and the others were subsequently subjected to a fast-tracked virtual hearing at which they were charged with treason and conspiracy.
There has been no information regarding when or to what those who have been charged will be sentenced.
The injustice, however, is obvious: Pastor Palacios Vargas and his friends and family have been targeted because he has a history of vocally criticising the Nicaraguan government under the leadership of Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo. This, in the eyes of a regime that has done everything in its power to stifle and silence independent voices over the past seven years, is the ultimate offence.
A wanted man
Pastor Palacios Vargas founded the La Roca de Nicaragua Church Association in Jinotepe in 2008. The church was legally registered in August of that year, and has since grown to six branches with a total of 1,500 members across multiple departments along the Pacific border.
In April 2018, like many other religious leaders, Pastor Palacios Vargas accompanied his sons and other students to protests which had swept across the country initially in response to proposed social security reforms. In Jinotepe, as throughout the country, protesters constructed barricades to stop the traffic of transport trucks. Pastor Palacios Vargas brought food and water and prayed for the young people protesting; in his view, their struggle was just.
‘I supported them and I don’t regret it,’ he said in a 2019 interview with journalist Gerall Chávez for Nicaragua Actual. ‘Because the injustice that we were seeing, the violence that we were seeing, it was something that had to be denounced. I, as a pastor, as a leader, I should be at the side of the people and I should denounce those abuses that are not correct and that affect the people.’
On 12 May 2018 he spoke out publicly against the actions of the Ortega government: ‘I was saying that it wasn’t right to attack young people,’ he explained later. ‘That it wasn’t right to attack the youth’s protests, I said that what the government was doing was not right – to the young people of our population. I made a statement that the political situation could not remain as it was. That the president could not govern and should resign. That was it.’
Over the following days, Pastor Palacios Vargas and his family received threats via phone and on social media, ultimately forcing him to flee the country with his two oldest children and two other relatives in the same situation on 6 July 2018.
Two days later, the government launched what they called ‘Operation Cleanup’, in which police and paramilitaries used military weapons against students and civilians to remove roadblocks across the country. Twenty-two people were killed in Jinotepe alone.
During the operation, the front of the Palacios Vargas family home was graffitied with the message: ‘Murderer, Wanted, FSLN’. Paramilitaries surrounded his church and ransacked it, taking chairs, computers and other items. ‘They thought we had weapons,’ he said in the same interview with Gerall Chávez. ‘But what we had were Bibles, instruments to worship God. We never had any weapons in the church. Our weapons are spiritual… the weapons we use are powerful in God, and that is why we are winning this battle, and we are going to win this battle because God is with us.’
Even worse, Pastor Palacios Vargas – at this point in exile – was informed that on 8 July 2018, Luis Acevedo, 27, a church leader who helped with missions and acted as head English-Spanish translator, had been murdered at the entrance of his home during the attack on Jinotepe. Mr Acevedo did not participate in the roadblocks, but had gone out to help the students who were being pursued and been wounded by paramilitaries and police. He was shot three times in front of his wife and three young children.
The same day, Gerald Barrera Villavicencio, a second young man from La Roca Church, was also killed after being shot by paramilitaries, and Ricardo Largaespada Ramos, a lawyer and founder of the Sandinista Youth in his area, who Pastor Palacios described as present at every Sunday morning service, was beaten to death by paramilitaries.
In addition to all of this, three church security guards were also arrested. Two were later released, but the other was prosecuted as a criminal and accused of terrorism. Other members of Pastor Palacio Vargas’ church were forced to flee with their children because they had participated in the roadblocks. Everyone understood they were in grave danger.
On 29 August 2018 the official newspaper El 19 Digital published a list of names of men turned over by the Public Ministry to the common courts for what it branded ‘the terror roadblocks’ in Jinotepe, Dolores and Diriamba municipalities. Those on the list were accused of causing serious damage to the economy and conspiring to commit torture, robbery, kidnapping and murder. Pastor Palacios Vargas’s name was on the list – specifically for providing food to ‘delinquents’ and being present at various roadblocks – as were those of, Tomás Maldonado Bermúdez, the pastor of the Jesus is Lord Evangelical Church in Jinotepe who angered the government because of his practice of going out to pray at the protesters’ road blocks, his son Joao Ismael Maldonado Bermúdez, and several others who were accused of leading of the supposed criminal gang.
A drop in the ocean
With its leader having essentially been labelled a terrorist by the Ortega regime, attendance at Pastor Palacios Vargas’ church – once one of the largest in Jinotepe – plummeted rapidly, from more than 600 to less than 150, prompting it to move to a smaller location.
In 2019 the association to which it belonged, and of which Pastor Palacios Vargas was president, was arbitrarily stripped of its legal status. Over 5,000 independent civil society organisations, including over 1,300 organisations of a religious nature, have shared the same fate since the April 2018 protests. Despite all of this, La Roca Church and its branches on the Pacific Coast continued to operate.
In December 2020 Pastor Palacios Vargas returned to Nicaragua following a cancer diagnosis. One month later, in January 2021, he was placed under close police supervision, essentially amounting to house arrest, by the National Police and obligated to request permission from the authorities if he wished to go anywhere. As the months passed, he received increasingly frequent visits from officers who would take a photo of his face and his fingerprints each time.
Again, Pastor Palacios Vargas’ experience is by no means isolated. In recent years CSW has documented a concerning trend of religious leaders being subjected to similar restrictions – referred to by the government as precautionary measures – in which they are assigned a specific local police officer and ordered to report to the officer on a weekly basis to have their photo taken and to submit plans for their weekly activities. Religious leaders subjected to these measures also face restrictions on their freedom of movement, and some report that they have been warned they will be detained or exiled if they do not obey the terms of the measures.
Inside Nicaragua’s prisons there are countless others like Pastor Palacios Vargas – imprisoned because they dared to speak out against the repression of the Nicaraguan government, or in some cases just for being perceived as having done so because they preached about peace or justice or unity or encouraged people to pray for their country.
The international community must do more. The government may have withdrawn from the United Nations Human Rights Council and other prominent international bodies such as the Organisation of American States, but the force and desperation with which it attempts to silence any and all criticism or dissent highlights just how aware it is of its own vulnerability to pressures from within.
It is therefore the duty of states committed to human rights and democracy to increase those pressures: by providing financial and other forms of support for independent civil society organisations working on the situation of human rights and the restoration of democracy in Nicaragua, by amplifying the voices of Nicaraguan human rights defenders both within the country and in exile, and by insisting that the Ortega-Murrillo regime’s unjust treatment of Pastor Palacios Vargas and hundreds of others like him does not go unnoticed.
‘My message is that we should have faith, we should have hope – let us maintain unity…Let us pray to the Lord, because this is the way we are going to come out of this, so that our country is free. But yes, have hope, this is not going to be eternal, I think that soon we will see signs of more change because international pressure is going to increase, the internal pressure, from Nicaraguans is going to increase.
We Nicaraguans are not going to leave it like this, we are not going to leave it like this. Even the prisoners will continue in the struggle, the exiles are going to continue in the struggle, the people inside [Nicaragua] are going to continue in the struggle. Daniel [Ortega] should not believe that things will carry on like this. We will resist. We Nicaraguans are an unyielding people.
I want to see a free Nicaragua, freedom where our rights are respected, where there is rule of law, division of powers, free and truly transparent elections, where our young people can peacefully go out onto the streets, where our children can peacefully enjoy our neighbourhoods, that evil would disappear completely from Nicaragua.’
- Pastor Rudy Palacios Vargas
By CSW’s Research and Advocacy Officer for Nicaragua