According to a senior Vatican source, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has ordered the closure of the Vatican Embassy in Managua as well as the Nicaraguan Embassy to the Vatican in Rome.
Nicaragua indicated that the move, which came just days after Pope Francis compared the Nicaraguan government to a dictatorship, constituted a “suspension” of diplomatic relations.
According to a Vatican source, while the closures do not necessarily imply a complete break in relations between Managua and the Holy See, they are significant steps toward that possibility.
Ortega’s administration has become increasingly isolated internationally since he began harshly cracking down on dissent in the aftermath of street protests that erupted in 2018. Ortega described the protests as a coup attempt against his government.
Last month, Nicaraguan authorities sentenced Bishop Rolando Alvarez to more than 26 years in prison on treason, undermining national integrity, and spreading false news charges.
Alvazez was convicted after refusing to leave the country with 200 other political prisoners who had been released by Ortega’s government and sent to the US. Alvarez was stripped of his citizenship after refusing to board the plane.
In an interview published last week with Latin American online news outlet Infobae ahead of Monday’s 10th anniversary of his pontificate, the pope pointed to Alvarez’s imprisonment and likened what was happening in Nicaragua to the “1917 Communist dictatorship or that of Hitler in 1935”.
For years, neither embassy’s staff had been reduced to bare bones, with only a chargé d’affaires for the Vatican in Managua and almost no one for Nicaragua in Rome.
Since the crackdown on anti-government protests in 2018, when the Church acted as a mediator between both sides, the relationship between the Nicaraguan Catholic Church and the government has been severely strained.
The Church demanded justice for the more than 360 people who had died as a result of the unrest.
Nicaraguan Bishop Silvio Baez, another government critic, went into exile in 2019.
The Vatican protested Nicaragua’s effective expulsion of its ambassador a year ago, saying the unilateral action was unjustified and incomprehensible.
After the government withdrew its approval of the envoy, Archbishop Waldemar Sommertag, who had been critical of Nicaragua’s slide away from democracy, was forced to leave the country abruptly.
