Nicaragua still a little more isolated on the international scene? The country is considering suspending relations with the Vatican, the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry said on Sunday (March 12) after pope francis considered that this Central American country was “a crude dictatorship”.
“Faced with information disseminated by sources linked to Catholic Churchthe Government of Reconciliation and National Unity of Our Blessed and Still Free Nicaragua specifies that a suspension of diplomatic relations is being considered between the Vatican State and the Republic of Nicaragua,” the ministry said in a statement.
Pope Francis thus described the regime of President Daniel Ortega in an interview with the Argentinian daily Infobae. “With all due respect, I have no choice but to believe that this leader suffers from an imbalance,” he added in this newspaper.
“It’s as if we wanted to establish the communist dictatorship of 1917 or the Hitlerian dictatorship of 1935”, continued the pope. “These are crude dictatorships”.
The Vatican “mafia”.
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had estimated at the end of February that a “mafia” within the Vatican decided on the election of the pope and senior religious leaders.
“The people should elect the cardinals and there should be a vote among the Catholic people (…) so that the pope is also elected, by a direct vote of the people, so that it is the people who decide and not the mafia that is organized there in the Vatican,” said Daniel Ortega.
This diatribe by the Nicaraguan president came more than a week after a statement by Pope Francis who said he was “concerned” and “saddened” by the situation in Nicaragua, in particular after the 26-year prison sentence of Bishop Rolando Álvarez and the deportation of 222 opponents to the United States.
On February 9, the government of Daniel Ortega released 222 political prisoners, deported them to the United States and stripped them of their Nicaraguan nationality.
Bishop Rolando Álvarez, detained since August 2022, refused to be extradited and was sentenced the next day to 26 years in prison, in particular for “conspiring and spreading false news”.
With AFP