Nicaraguan dictatorship confiscates Catholic school: ‘An outrage against religious freedom’

ACI Prensa Staff, Aug 15, 2025 / 14:03 pm

The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and his wife and “co-president” Rosario Murillo in Nicaragua on Aug. 12 confiscated the iconic San José Catholic School in Jinotepe, accusing the school of having been a place where “coup-plotters tortured and murdered.”

In a statement released by a media outlet aligned with the dictatorship, Murillo said that “we have a new education center. This is an achievement of the peace we are experiencing, that we safeguard, that we deserve. In Jinotepe, a school where the coup-plotters tortured and murdered comrades during the criminal occupation, and where did these crimes occur? Unfortunately, at San José School.”

“That school has been transferred to the state because it is emblematic of barbarism, but at the same time of the dignified and victorious struggle, in this case we in the Jinotepe family [community] who defeated the coup attempt,” she added.

“It will bear the name, now in the hands of the Nicaraguan state, of the hero, the martyr comrade Bismarck Martínez,” whose “murder shocked the entire country” in 2018.

Martínez was a Sandinista sympathizer who disappeared on the night of June 29, 2018, when he drove near the San José School in Jinotepe. He was allegedly “kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared.” The regime has turned Martínez into a martyr to “reinforce its narrative” about the alleged “coup d’état,” the newspaper Confidencial said.

Jinotepe was one of the towns most affected by the Nicaraguan dictatorship’s “Operation Cleanup” against the civilian population who had taken to the streets to protest against the regime. On the night of July 8, 2018, hundreds of police and paramilitary forces invaded the town. According to the newspaper Article 66, at least 32 people were killed.

‘An outrage against religious freedom’

Martha Patricia Molina, researcher and author of the report “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church,” which in its latest edition lists nearly 1,000 attacks by the dictatorship against the Catholic Church since 2018, told ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, that Aug. 12 is a “date that will be marked as a day of infamy for religious freedom in Nicaragua.”

“The dictatorship has once again dealt a severe blow to the Catholic Church by confiscating the San José School, run by the Josephine nuns,” which has provided a good education to many Nicaraguans since the 1980s.

“The confiscation will have a negative impact on the children and young people who received a quality education and will now be indoctrinated by the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship. In addition to confiscating the nuns’ property, co-dictator Rosario Murillo calls them murderers and torturers,” Molina lamented.

However, the researcher clarified, “we all know that the Josephine sisters, since they first established themselves in Nicaragua in February 1915, have educated boys and girls in Christian and humanist values based on love for one’s neighbor and the practice of charity.”

Parents don’t want ‘indoctrination by a dictatorship’

Parents, who will have a different school in the way it is run starting Monday, Aug. 18, with a new principal aligned with the dictatorship, expressed their concern for their children’s future.

A mother, identified as Cecilia, told the newspaper Confidencial that “this brazen theft of the school where generations of professionals studied is deplorable, and they are accusing it of fabricated crimes, where the only thing the nuns did was treat the wounded and shelter the population from the bullets and the terrible repression in 2018.”

Regarding what will happen to her daughter, the woman was clear: “I don’t want her to end up in a school where the only thing that will take place is indoctrination by a dictatorship.”

Another parent, identified only as Santiago, said he was “sick and sad” but “deeply angry because they are ruining what little remains of quality private education.”

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The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs denounced the expropriation on X, calling it “further proof that the Murillo-Ortega dictatorship’s cruelty knows no bounds.” 

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.