Colon priest Donaciano Alarcón affirms that he is safe and sound, and that he is awaiting the assignment of a new parish in charge of the Claretian congregation in a Central American country, after he was expelled from Nicaragua on Monday.

“Yesterday (Monday, April 3, 2023) in the morning, when we were going to the Chrism mass, we were stopped (a police vehicle) abruptly and they told me that they were going to expel me from the country or that they were going to put me in jail” , said Alarcón during an interview on Radio Hogar, conducted by its director Eduardo Soto Pimentel.

“We went to the Chrism mass, we came to lunch with another father and two other men, then they asked me for my documents, they told me that I had to get out of the car, that I had to accompany them.”

“They put me in the patrol car and took me to the border. I didn’t know what to do until some ladies supported them,” the priest narrated. The priest explained that the policeman told him that “all the homilies on Sunday were dedicated to our bishop who is in prison.” They were referring to Bishop Rolando Álvarez, one of the critics of the Ortega government who was sentenced to 26 years in prison for “treason against the homeland”, “undermining national integrity” and “spreading false news”.

The police officers also told the colonense priest that he was carrying out a corny way in the communities of the urban network “and he told me that he had gone to a community to organize a revolt… I told them that all this was a lie,” he explained.

The priest narrated that “that day I did not preach because that gospel is very long. They were on the outskirts of all the temples.”

“At the end of the first mass, – he continues – I went to a chapel where a priest friend was, I went to look for an alb (white vestment worn by priests) to go to the Chrism mass, which was yesterday (Monday)”.

The policeman asked him to remain calm that it was just a “warning”, “be calm”, he told him.

In Nicaragua “there is an uncomfortable situation because you can’t talk about anything, I have never talked about politics because it doesn’t interest me, but when the gospel touches on the issue of justice, I do not reserve myself, I speak,” he added.

The latter seems to have caused the Nicaraguan regime, pointed out by Pope Francis and by the Latin American curia for being a “rude dictatorship”, with overtones of a “communist or Hitlerian dictatorship”, to decide to mount him in a patrol, take him to the border with Honduras. and warn him that he could not re-enter Nicaraguan territory.

Father Donaciano Alarcón, who was part of the Colonian clergy, has been in the Claretians for two years and was assigned to Nicaragua for a year and a half. “I was in Panama in January on vacation, it was the last time he entered Nicaraguan territory,” explained the colonense priest.

Alarcón clarified that it is a lie that he was barefoot, as the first versions of his capture affirmed. “He came from the mass, we Panamanians like to be elegant, especially the people of Colon, that is, I was” handsome “, he clarified.

He said that his passport was recovered by his companions, he assures that the policemen treated him in a “polite” manner. “Only they took me to the border and told me: you’re out, you can’t come in here anymore.”

There are currently six Claretian missionaries in Nicaragua, said Father Ismael Montero, superior of the Claretians in Central America. “Only one is Nicaraguan, it is likely that we will have to send another, but we prefer that they expel those who come from other countries and that they do not imprison the Nicaraguan national missionaries,” he explained.

Ulloa is pronounced

The Archbishop of Panama, José Domingo Ulloa, spoke and reiterated the words of the Latin American episcopate and those of Pope Francis himself: “it is a regime in which all religious freedoms have been broken.”

“We regret and pray for the noble people of Nicaragua and for what they are suffering at this time in their history…”.

Ulloa described the fact as “absurd, we do not learn from history. There are people that power really makes them see another reality… here what they have to do is wait, sooner or later all these dictators fall”.