The Nicaraguan authorities have frozen the bank accounts of the Jesuit-run Central American University (UCA) in the capital Managua, and have also blocked the university’s ability to manage its property.
In an email to students and academics on 10 August, the university said it was facing “a difficult situation”.
“We are undertaking the relevant actions to overcome obstacles and difficulties that affect our normal functioning and make it difficult for us to carry out banking operations. We maintain our commitment to students, teachers and other staff,” it said.
Student organisations have expressed alarm at the government measures in a joint statement.
“Any takeover of the UCA would have catastrophic consequences in academic and humanitarian terms, since it would provoke a flight of knowledge and talent that would, yet again, impoverish the future of Nicaragua,” they said.
The Nicaraguan government has also delayed the UCA’s process of accreditation, and cut the funding support it used to receive.
Since 2021 the government has imposed restrictions on 25 private universities, including the Protestant Martin Luther King University.
The UCA, considered the leading private university in Nicaragua, provided refuge to protesters during the mass protests against Daniel Ortega’s authoritarian regime in 2018.
A Jesuit university with the same name exists in the capital of El Salvador, San Salvador. There, in 1989, six Jesuit academics, a housekeeper and her daughter were murdered by government forces.
On 6 August the Archbishop of San Salvador, José Luis Escobar Alas, specified one of these six Jesuits, Fr Ignacio Ellacuría SJ, when he initiated the canonisation process for “a large group of our martyrs from the recent armed conflict that we have suffered in the country”.
The Nicaraguan immigration authorities have also refused re-entry to two priests returning from World Youth Day in Lisbon.
Fr Tomás Sergio Zamora Calderón is parish priest of Nuestro Señor de los Milagros in Malpaisillo, in the western Diocese of Leon, and Fr William Mora is parish priest of Cristo Rey Norte in Paiwas, in the north-eastern Diocese of Siuna where he is also director of youth ministry.
They had accompanied the Nicaraguan delegation to Lisbon but on their return on 12 August were denied entry to the country.
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