Victor Ticay is in jail since April 6. On June 22, the regime confirmed he was declared guilty on June 9, but to what penalty he was sentenced is a state secret.
by Massimo Introvigne
The Catholic Church in Nicaragua is suffering a continuous persecution by the neo-Marxist regime of Daniel Ortega. Bishops and priests are arrested, universities and schools are closed, nuns are expelled from the country.
One of the last, silent way remaining for Catholics to protest is to go quietly to Mass and attend processions and other festivals, at least those that have not been forbidden yet. One popular procession honors Jesus as the Señor de La Reseña, and is held in Nandaime on Holy Wednesday, during the Easter Week.
This year, the success of the procession was a clear message to the regime, even if it had no political content. A popular TV journalist known for following events on his bicycle, Victor Ticay, covered the procession and documented how the devotees were harassed and threatened by the regime’s police.
After he posted his video on Facebook, Ticay was arrested on April 6. His whereabouts were kept secret, even if netizens reported he ended up in the dreaded jail “Jorge Navarro,” known as “La Modelo,” where opponents are routinely tortured.
On June 26, it was officially confirmed that Ticay had been sentenced on June 9 and the decision had been registered on June 14. He was found guilty of “spreading unauthorized news” and “endangering national security.”
However, the details of the sentence, including the penalty, are kept secret for reasons of national security. What is known is that the judge who sentenced Ticay was Karen Vanessa Chavarría Morales, who had been sanctioned in 2022 by the United States for her complicity in gross human rights violations. Her court division is known for having sentenced critics of the regime to heavy jail penalties, some in excess of twenty years.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
