Nicaragua: Four years of banning Holy Week without any condemnation from Pedro Sánchez

The predominantly Catholic people of Nicaragua are facing their fourth year with Holy Week processions completely banned.

Sánchez joins Spain with 14 dictatorships in his hate campaign against Israel
Nicaragua: a new communist persecution to Christians and two scandalous silences

The repressive wave of Daniel Ortega's dictatorship

Since the return to power of the communist Daniel Ortega in 2007, the country has experienced a drift increasingly similar to that of the socialist dictatorship of Venezuela, with electoral fraud to keep Ortega in power and a wave of repression that has increasingly spread to more layers of society. In September 2018, Ortega declared all demonstrations against his government illegal, after the violent response unleashed by the regime left 326 protesters dead.

With the support of Vladimir Putin's dictatorship, the Ortega regime banned the main opposition party in 2021. The ideological fanaticism of that communist dictatorship has also directed all its fury against Christians, with the arrests of Catholic bishops, priests, and seminarians (whose whereabouts are unknown in most cases), and the exile of several bishops (including the president of the Nicaraguan Episcopal Conference), as well as priests and religious, including 18 Missionaries of Charity, whose order is dedicated to serving the poorest.

The dictatorship has been banning Holy Week processions for four years

In February 2023, the Ortega dictatorship also banned all public Holy Week celebrations, a Christian holiday with centuries of tradition in that country. This ban remains in place in 2026, for the fourth consecutive year. Nicaraguan lawyer Martha Patricia Molina has denounced that between 2019 and July 2025, the dictatorship prohibited 16,564 religious processions and activities. The prohibition of these religious acts goes to such extremes that in 2023 a journalist was sentenced to 8 years in prison for covering a Catholic procession in defiance of that prohibition, a sentence made under false accusations such as "spreading false news" and "conspiracy to commit impairment of national integrity".

The Sánchez government's silence in the face of this anti-Catholic persecution

While all this was happening in that Central American country, the reaction of the Prime Minister of Spain has been radically different from his swift condemnation of Israel for suspending celebrations at the holy sites in Jerusalem due to attacks by the Iranian dictatorship. On his Twitter account, Pedro Sánchez has never made a single mention of Nicaragua or the dictator Daniel Ortega. The fanatical persecution suffered by Catholics in that country seems to matter very little to him, just like the persecution of Christians in other communist dictatorships such as China or North Korea, which the Spanish socialist leader has also never mentioned.

Similarly, his Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, has not published a single tweet about the persecution of Catholics in Nicaragua. However, two days ago, summoned the Israeli chargé d'affaires in Spain to demand explanations for a security measure affecting Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Jerusalem due to attacks by Iran, an Islamist dictatorship that puts photos of Sánchez on its missiles as a sign of gratitude to the Spanish government for its hostile attitude toward Israel.

Sánchez's government and Ortega's dictatorship, together in the Hague Group

In July 2025, the government of Pedro Sánchez joined the Hague Group to impose an arms embargo on Israel. This group, of which Switzerland is not a member despite its misleading name, is a coalition of leftist and Islamist governments, including 14 dictatorships. Among its founders is the communist dictatorship of Cuba, and it has the support of the dictatorship of Nicaragua.

The support of Sánchez's communist partners for Ortega's dictatorship

Likewise, the communist faction of the Spanish government has been supporting the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as can be seen in the messages published on the Twitter account of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), the party to which Vice President Yolanda Díaz and Minister Sira Rego belong. Likewise, in December 2020, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Congress of Deputies approved a condemnation of human rights violations in Nicaragua, but Podemos, which was then Sánchez's government partner, abstained, accusing the parties that supported that condemnation of promoting "a reactionary agenda" in Nicaragua.

In June 2021, Congress called on the government to impose sanctions against the Ortega dictatorship, and Podemos voted against it, a typical stance for this far-left party whenever the interests of Russia and its allies are at stake. To this day, Sánchez still depends on Podemos' votes to govern. Is that what explains his great hostility toward Israel and his silence on Nicaragua?

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Photo: VOA. Nicaraguan police officers with riot gear outside a church in Masaya on April 20, 2021.