By Fabrizio Casari on June 8, 2023
It is difficult to believe that the $500,000 found in sacks in a Church property as part of a money laundering operation was intended for the purchase of candles for the faithful.
This Nicaraguan story that can be read in European or Latin American newspapers speaks of sacks full of money found in several dioceses. It is, however, partial information, which tends to present the detail in order to hide the background, which is much more serious and disturbing. The sacks, which contained the not inconsiderable sum of US$500,000, were found by the Nicaraguan National Police in an operation carried out as part of a vast money laundering investigation. But these are only a small part of the evidentiary findings, disturbing as they are in themselves. The investigation by the Nicaraguan Public Ministry is much broader and deeper; it investigates the transit of several million dollars through diocesan accounts in the name of several priests and bishops.
Millions of dollars entered the country illegally, and it is still unclear what responsibility the banks or individual bank functionaries have in the operation; the investigation will find out. In the meantime, however, the discovery has resulted in the competent authorities blocking the operation of the mentioned accounts because there is clear evidence of money laundering for the financing of terrorist activities and personal gain.
There is also another related line of investigation – no less important – about land and other real estate in the name of bishops, priests and front men that were first acquired and then illegally transferred. It involves tens of thousands of hectares located in rural, urban and semi-urban areas throughout the country.
One could, keeping within the story, relate this matter to any police operation aimed at stopping crimes; but what is certain is that when it is about the Church and when the crime scene is Nicaragua, the chronicle becomes the visible tip of the political iceberg.
The questions that arise are several: how is it that Nicaraguan bishops and priests happen to be the owners of such wealth? It is hard to imagine that it is a modern version of the vow of poverty. It is wealth that has never been reported and that can only have two origins: either it was sent from abroad through unofficial channels, or it was the property of the Nicaraguan oligarchy transferred to friendly priests to then be exported to the foreign accounts of stateless persons. An attempt to keep the booty safe on the part of those who, ceasing to have Nicaraguan nationality and citizenship, seek to put their wealth in friendly hands to recover what they consider their possessions.
As for the US$500,000 found in the sacks: what is the use of a sum of that magnitude, considering the scant pastoral activity and the minimal costs of its operation? It is difficult to be convinced that it was intended for the purchase of candles for the faithful; implausible to imagine such a sum for the purchase of hosts and bad wine; ridiculous, finally, to pretend that it was intended for charity. And so, one cannot fail to notice the incompatibility between the total amount and the publicly claimable needs related to the exercise of pastoral activity.
In 2018 [during the coup attempt] dioceses were used as logistical centers of coup terrorism, warehouses where horror found shelter, where the deception of the humanitarian and pacifying mission concealed the political direction of the coup. Now we find the underworld of the dioceses as money warehouses, counters of financial liquidity ready to be used. For illegal political use, certainly, not for charity.
The dust under the carpet
The first results show how the investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office uncovers heavy and disturbing truths, bringing to public light a traffic of money and goods attributable to illegal activities. It weaves alliances and intersections between coup activity, ecclesiastical hierarchies, and criminal activities that cannot be reduced to the phenomena of creative and circumscribed finances. It reminds us of the repurposing of the Church for a subversive role, different from that of serving God.
It is credible to hypothesize that the choice of priests and dioceses was based on the presumed greater agility of priests and bishops, considered somehow safeguarded by diplomacy and political expediency. The clergy were considered the only navigable channel for illegal operations. It is likely that an illegal operation was put in place to recover confiscated or forfeitable goods, and ditto for cash, probably useful to cover the immediate organizational needs, both domestic and foreign, of the coup families.
As in 2018, it is conceivable that funds would have been channeled partly to the oligarchy and partly to the enlisted criminal organizations. But to have mounted these operations and expect to succeed in them is yet another demonstration of how little is known about the Nicaraguan Police, its investigative units, and its intelligence organs. Sandinista Nicaragua, unwilling to back down in the face of crime, knows how to defend itself.
Nicaragua has accustomed us to the unusual, to that kind of scenario where you have to go deep into the substratum to see the important layer, where what happens always has a reason and often an unmentionable reason. If one does not want to believe the fable of the persecution of the Church or the innocence of the priests, it is enough to go deep into the substratum to discover how everything has a common thread. The criminal activity is both the cause and consequence of a political action aimed at the permanent destabilization of Nicaragua.
To understand it all, it is worth looking at how the post-2018 period marked a turning point in the activity of the ecclesiastical hierarchies. They are undergoing a process of transformation to become key political actors, resituating themselves within civil society in the role of catalyzing agent of the coup opposition.
Changes of attire
The defeat of the coup attempt brought with it the total disarticulation of the political and media structure on which the coup was based, while the religious structure remained to sustain its function and also took on the media-political one.
The Catholic Church is today the catalyst of the opposition. In part, this is an internal option due to the fact that the Church is trying to fill the space left vacant by the end of the coup parties, whose last remnants flew out of Managua months ago. To this end, some priests developed an intense political activity: abandoning their apparent hypocritical neutrality, they incited destabilization against the government from every pulpit, transforming their mission of recovering souls into enlisting bodies.
But its definitive transformation into a political subject was decided by the White House, which wanted to confirm and reinforce what had already been established during the attempted coup: the church must exercise the leadership of anti-Sandinismo. Because only the church has a minimal social base and only the church still enjoys a benevolent name at the international level, given the total discredit of the coup plotters even by western governments that also detest Sandinismo.
After all, this attitude of the Nicaraguan Catholic Church has always been there, given the historical imprint of the CEN (Nicaraguan Bishops Conference), which was always the blanket that covered Somocismo, trying to whitewash its horror. Until 1979 there was a communion of intentions between the clergy and the Somoza family; equally evident was the support for the Contra in the 80s and the Church backing of the 17 years of neo-liberal horror [three pro-US governments], with which it expressed a genuine sentimental connection. Then came the role of leading terrorism in 2018. In short, never, not even for a short period of history, has the CEN been neutral, consistent with the fascist fervor of the Bishops Conferences throughout Latin America.
Today, the Church does not hide its new disguise. However, the shameless and unbridled use of the ecclesiastical pulpit in a political function cannot fail to find a political response, just as every criminal action in violation of the law cannot fail to find a response from law enforcement structures. Cassocks are not enough to protect against [paying for] crimes: this is true everywhere in the world and even more so in Nicaragua, given the toll of blood and suffering it has paid to achieve peace and coexistence.
The questions, each and every one of them, digress in the examination of facts and circumstances, of characters and places; but where and by how much they digress, like tributaries of a river they only find an answer at the mouth: the construction of the conditions for a new coup attempt is the political program of the Church. Coup subversivism is the only way in which the right wing feels it can relate to the country, and the money needed for the operations must come in any way it can.
They know it well in the President’s office, where patience has ended and officials respond blow by blow to the supposed untouchability of a sect that has traded faith for hate, prayers for terror, pastoral mission for subversion.
The political leadership of the country knows that the defeat of the subversive attempt does not mean the end of the coup project, so there will be no underestimation. The fact that it enjoys a powerful international support changes little, the accounts are drawn up in Nicaragua and not elsewhere.
It is well known that peace is not a lasting good; if you don’t defend it, you lose it. So, on the part of Sandinismo there will be no uncertainty or hesitation, no indulgence or timidity in acting. There will be no mistakes in the defense of peace. Because whoever lets his guard down, sooner or later lets his head down.
Fabrizio Casari is an Italian journalist who writes frequently about Nicaragua.
Source: Radio La Primerisima, translation Nan McCurdy