Sat at a desk in an office close to Westminster Cathedral, Juan Sebastián Chamorro appears every inch a distinguished politician. He is a well-groomed man of 53 who speaks perfect English with a Nicaraguan accent, even mastering slang. He has after all had a little time to brush up on his second language because since February 2023 he has been living in exile in the United States, flown out of his native country with more than 200 other political prisoners after spending about two years in jail.
The previous year he was sentenced to 13 years imprisonment for treason. He was held in the maximum security El Chipote prison where, with other political prisoners, he was repeatedly interrogated and maltreated, cooped up in cells with continuous 24 hours of light and poor sanitation and denied fresh air and exercise.
Mr Chamorro was in London to give evidence to the Nicaragua Inquiry, a cross-party Parliamentary ad-hoc investigation into politically motivated targeting of the opposition, including religious leaders and institutions, media and others.
He speaks with tremendous authority because he was directly targeted simply because he planned to run for the Presidency of Nicaragua against Daniel Ortega, a man his aunt, Violeta Chamorro, defeated in 1990. Two months after declaring his nomination in April 2021, Mr Chamorro was snatched from his home by armed police and taken to jail.
Ortega tolerates no challenges to his power, he says, giving as another example the campaign against the very beautiful Sheynnis Palacios, a Miss Nicaragua who last year was crowned Miss Universe.
‘It might sound really crazy that we talk about this,’ says Mr Chamorro, “but the government was really upset because the people were out on the streets celebrating”.
Before Palacios could return home, the regime arrested Karen Celebertti, the director of Nicaragua’s Miss Universe franchise, and held her in solitary confinement for six weeks, charging her with conspiracy against the state.
Palacios, who was photographed waving a Nicaraguan flag during the student protests against Ortega of 2018 when she was 17, was then too frightened to go home. She is now effectively in exile because she knows she will be arrested.
Similarly, the Catholic Church, Mr Chamorro explains, is threatened because, in the eyes of Ortega, “it is a political structure that he needs to destroy”. He does this mainly by attacking the clergy as “corrupt”, “sinners” and “coup plotters” and kicking them out of their country. In October, 12 clerics were expelling followed by another 18 in January, including two bishops.
Mr Chamorro has “no doubt” that the persecution of the Church will continue.
“Right now the churches are filled with spies with telephones recording sermons,” he says. “There are no more processions, they’re prohibited. Processions are important in the Christian culture of Latin America. They’re not allowed. Why? Because he doesn’t want public demonstrations on the streets.”
He continues: “His capacity for repression is huge. I don’t want to think about executions or things like that but it is a reality. People die … The bottom line here is he is using all his power to put terror into the population.”
Mr Chamorro had earlier told parliamentarians that Ortega began to wage war on the Church precisely because it stands on the side of the oppressed.
He gave the example of the Mother’s Day massacre of 19 young people during the civil unrest of 2018.
“The University of Central America, run by the Jesuits, opened its gates to protect thousands of people running away from snipers,” he said. “This action saved many lives, but it meant a death sentence to UCA, as Ortega later confiscated the university”.
Likewise Bishop Rolando Alvarez of Matagalpa was harassed, arrested and sentenced to 26 years in prison before he was banished because his “immense popularity was not tolerated by the regime”
In the last five years he and other members of the Catholic Church have been “victims of stigmatization, physical aggression, harassment, exile, prohibition to re-enter their own country, passport confiscation, censorships, subject to fake trials, condemned, incarcerated, banished from the their homeland and stripped of their nationality”, Mr Chamorro told the parliamentary inquiry.
“Even the papal nuncio was expelled,” he said. “Churches have been attacked, images burned, their bank accounts frozen, entire religious orders expelled, schools and universities confiscated, accused of money laundering, eliminated of their legal status and the elimination and confiscation of church-related media outlets.”
He said: “The religious persecution against the Church is the result of hate. It is hate against the position of the Church in support of the suffering people of Nicaragua.”
I asked him if he thought Pope Francis could be more influential through diplomacy.
Mr Chamorro said: “Last April, he made a very strong reference to Ortega, comparing him to Stalin and Hitler and then you saw this increase in oppression of the Church. The way I see that is that Ortega responded very much like the way he responded against John Paul II back in the Eighties. He responded with all this cruel treatment.
“It’s hard because you want the Pope to be influential but it can also backfire because innocent people can begin to suffer. The Vatican will call for diplomacy always, anywhere. They have to keep maintaining that message but in terms of Ortega, I don’t see him negotiating anything. He has zero interest in rights or elections or democracy or anything like that.”
“Change can only come from within,” he adds, “but he will not allow elections. The last time they were scheduled he put in jail the entire opposition. He was clearly sending a message that he will not allow them. It’s a joke.”
And what about sanctions? “We were always asked about sanctions by the police officers in interrogations … (even though) there haven’t been any general trade sanctions of trade embargoes,” he says.
“They get hurt by sanctions. People get frightened by sanctions and that divides the base. I believe in some institutional sanctions against some specific institutions that get financed by the international community.
“The army and police should be accountable … You can’t expect sanctions to do all the work. We have to expose all the crimes Ortega has committed against humanity in the last decade. I think that there is a big case that can be made to the International Court of Justice.”
Irrespective of whatever iron grip Ortega fastens around Nicaragua at the present time, it is safe to say that, at 77 years old, the future does not belong to him. Although the junta is a family affair, dynasties tend to be constitutionally weak and unstable.
Mr Chamorro thinks of Ortega’s cabal to be a little like that of Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania, which didn’t end well at all.
When Ortega falls, either suddenly or in the long term, Mr Chamorro is among those young and capable enough to fill his shoes with ease and willing also to usher Nicaragua out of dictatorship and into democracy.
“I am not giving up,” he says. “I really love my country and really want to go back. To get involved in politics, certainly that will be the case. Who knows how long it’s going to take?”
That doesn’t really matter. It will be worth the wait.
(Picture of Juan Sebastián Chamorro by Simon Caldwell)
This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click here.
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