The Nicaraguan regime has released a Catholic bishop <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/nicaraguan-bishop-jail-for-26-years-after-he-spurns-offer-of-exile-in-united-states/"><strong>jailed </strong></a>earlier this year for 26 years on treason charges connected with his use of social media, according to reports.
Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa has been moved from the Jorge Navarro de Tipitapa National Penitentiary System, a notorious prison known as “La Modelo”, and might soon be forcibly sent into exile.
Bianca Jagger, who has <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/my-plea-to-end-the-persecution-of-catholics-in-nicaragua-the-land-of-my-birth/"><strong>campaigned relentlessly</strong> </a>for the release of Bishop Álvarez, tweeted: “I have been informed that … he was taken out of La Modelo prison, and that the regime intends to send him to Rome.”
A diplomatic source cited by <strong><a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/nicaraguan-catholic-bishop-alvarez-released-prison-local-media-2023-07-05/">Reuters</a> </strong>news agency confirmed that negotiations between the hard-left regime of President Daniel Ortega and the country's Catholic bishops were ongoing while the bishop was in the care of a Catholic residency in Managua, the capital.
The source said that if the bishop refused to leave the country he would be returned to prison to serve his sentence.
Bishop Álvarez resisted an attempt to fly him to exile in the United States in February when he refused to board a plane with 222 other political and religious prisoners.
He was summarily tried and sentenced the following day for “undermining national security and sovereignty, spreading fake news through information technology, obstructing an official in the performance of his duties, aggravated disobedience or contempt of authority”.
Ms Jagger, the founder, president and chief executive of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, had previously <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/jailed-nicaraguan-bishop-appears-in-video-staged-by-regime/"><strong>demanded</strong></a> proof that the bishop was alive and also requested permission to visit him.
The Nicaraguan regime responded by releasing photographs and a film of him being visited by his family in prison.
The bishop is said to be among 37 other political prisoners who remain in Nicaraguan jails since the dictator Ortega cracked down on political rivals, the free press and the Catholic Church.
More than 500 attacks on the Church followed the efforts of senior clergy to mediate in the national unrest of 2018 that claimed more than 300 lives and because of its calls for democratic reforms and for human rights to be upheld.
Ortega eventually agreed to elections in 2021 but he and Rosario Murillo, his wife and vice president, cleared the field of opposition by arresting seven other presidential candidates along with 140 politicians, intellectuals, businessmen, former diplomats and journalists. They include former Sandinista rebels who had once fought alongside him in the 1970s and 1980s.
Amid the crackdown, cathedrals and churches have been besieged and firebombed, and bishops and clergy depicted as enemies of the people siding with “coup plotters”.
