Rosario Murillo, the wife of Nicaragua’s communist dictator Daniel Ortega, on Tuesday lashed out against the Nicaraguan Catholic Church, accusing its priests of being “servants of Satan.”
Murillo, who since 2025 officially shares her husband’s dictatorial powers as “co-president” of Nicaragua, has been at the forefront of Ortega’s years-long persecution of Christianity and the Nicaraguan Catholic Church.
On Tuesday, speaking during a regime broadcast that she prefaced with messages about “faith” and “spiritual strength,” Murillo claimed that priests who oppose her husband’s communist regime are “servants of Satan” who commit sins and are full of “malice, envy, ambition, and greed.”
“Let them see themselves in the mirror of their own creation — malicious, pernicious, and anti-Christian — even as they appear in disguise in this blatant competition of egos, one and all. Those who appear in disguise, who have nothing of a shepherd, or a prophet, or a visionary — what they possess is malice, envy, ambition, and greed. A competition of evils,” Murillo proclaimed during the broadcast, according to a transcript published by the regime-affiliated outlet El19Digital.
“But then again, how can they call themselves ‘People of Love’ when all they’ve ever done is promote hatred and jealousy — even among themselves, within their own professions or trades — attack those who stood out more, attack those who knew more, attack those who also had more responsibilities, and serve the devil? Servants of Satan — that is what they have been, and what they are,” she continued.
Nicaraguan-Spanish priest Rafael Aragón denounced in December that Murillo, widely known to co-opt Christian messaging and twist it with pro-communist regime rhetoric, wants to “control” both Nicaragua’s Catholic and Protestant churches through her actions and steer Nicaraguan Christianity away from “what she considers to be Western culture dominated by Christianity.”
Ortega and Murillo have led a relentless persecution campaign against the Nicaraguan Catholic Church as punishment for the Church’s support of the 2018 wave of nationwide anti-communist protests. The regime response to the protests themselves left over 300 dead. In the following years, most notably from 2022 onwards, the Nicaraguan communist regime dramatically intensified its persecution of Christianity in Nicaragua. Independent investigations extensively documented over 1,000 different acts of persecution committed against Christians and the Catholic Church over the past six years.
Some of the actions include banning Holy Week processions, the unjust arrest and banishment of several Church members, and the forced seizure of a significant amount of Church assets, including bank accounts, universities, and media. For years, Murillo has hurled a litany of insults against Nicaraguan Catholic Church members, describing them as “devils, “demons,” “blasphemers,” or “false representatives of God.”
Murillo has also used her attacks against Nicaraguan priests to justify the regime’s repressive actions against the clergy. In 2022, she accused Bishop of Matagalpa Rolando Álvarez of having committed “sins against spirituality” for being an outspoken critic of the regime — an accusation that preceded a two-week police raid of the Matagalpa parish that concluded with the priest’s arrest and 26-year “treason” conviction. Bishop Álvarez, whose case is one of the most widely known under the Ortega regime, was ultimately banished to the Vatican in early 2024 and stripped of his Nicaraguan nationality.
Murillo reportedly availed herself of the opportunity this week to ridicule Nicaraguans who have been exiled from their country. According to Nicaraguan outlets, she described Nicaraguan exiles as “tailless kites” who “sell themselves to the highest bidder” and as “zopilotes,” a term used across Central America to refer to black vultures.
“I will never forget that pernicious, evil scheme, where some acted as lookouts to signal that something was about to happen, and then they themselves created the victims to photograph them, film them, and spread the footage throughout the upside-down world,” Murillo said, referring to the widely-available footage of the Ortega regime’s repressive acts. “The upside-down world — that is their world.”
“But the Commander arrived and put them on the plane, as the song goes. And there they are, lost in their own labyrinths. No one sent them,” she continued. “We, the Nicaraguan people, did not send them. Their masters! But when we say no one sent them, it is because they themselves chose that fate of being ‘kites without tails,’ because that is what they are: kites without tails, still seeking to do harm, using words that don’t even suit them.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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