As a group of 11 Nicaraguan pastors continue to languish in prison amid a crackdown on Christian churches by the Marxist regime of Daniel Ortega, the effort to free the men is continuing to pick up steam on Capitol Hill and in the federal government as lawmakers proceed with legislative efforts demanding their release.
The pastors’ ordeal began last December, when the Nicaraguan government arrested the men on charges of “organized crime” and “money laundering” without providing evidence substantiating the supposed crimes. In March, the pastors were sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison and fined $80 million each.
The clampdown on the pastors marked a swift about-face on the part of Ortega’s regime, as the government had appeared to initially endorse the series of evangelistic gospel campaigns put on by the Mountain Gateway ministry despite its history of religious repression, which had drawn almost one million people. But just weeks after a campaign in November, the pastors were arrested.
The pastors’ plight has caught the attention of numerous U.S. government officials and lawmakers. A congressional effort to free the pastors began in February as a bipartisan group of 58 congressmen and senators sent a letter to the Nicaraguan ambassador expressing their alarm, and a resolution was also put forward on their behalf. This week, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) held a virtual hearing to discuss the situation, in which Britt Hancock, founder and director of Mountain Gateway, testified about the pastors’ ordeal.
On Thursday, Hancock joined “Washington Watch” to discuss his testimony and the ongoing effort to free the 11 pastors.
“We were so blessed and thankful to have the opportunity to testify,” he noted. “[T]he more focus that we can get, the more likelihood that these different things that Congress and the State Department and hopefully other agencies in the executive branch can really send the signal to Nicaragua that the entire United States government is serious about this, that we as a country are serious about religious freedom and that tyranny and totalitarian ideas are not okay with us.”
Hancock went on to detail the status of the ongoing effort in Congress to free the imprisoned pastors.
“[T]here’s a resolution in the House, Resolution 1019, sponsored by Barry Moore [R-Ala.], and I think there’s close to 28 or 29 co-sponsors right now,” he explained. “We need that passed. Senator Rick Scott [R-Fla.] has sponsored a companion resolution to that one, Senate Resolution 607. We need that passed. We need as many members of Congress to make noise as possible. We need the Nicaraguan government to understand that everybody’s serious about this.”
Hancock further related that his organization has been unable to contact the captive pastors for seven months.
“It would be great if we could have Congress members calling for proof of life for our prisoners,” he urged. “We’ve had no contact with the prisoners since they were arrested in mid-December, seven months ago. And the families have not had any contact. Their legal representation in Nicaragua haven’t had any contact. We have really no direct information about them. So we need a proof of life. We need Nicaragua to respond and show us the prisoners.”
As Hancock went on to describe, the Ortega regime has engaged in sustained persecution of Christians in the small Central American country for at least the last six years.
“This is not new,” he underscored. “In 2018, there was a big uprising that the current government there put down pretty brutally. It’s well documented how they responded and they’ve thrown many people in jail. They’ve cancelled the registration and kicked out over 3,500 non-profits. And among those non-profits [are] hundreds of religious organizations. They’ve shut down schools and things like that.”
Nevertheless, as Hancock recounted, the government was at first open to Mountain Gateway’s evangelistic efforts in the country. “[We were] doing our best to respond to the Lord when he put it on our heart to do these mass evangelism campaigns in 2023, which the government completely agreed with and gave us all the permissions and helped us in many ways,” he said.
But due to the magnitude of the response from the Nicaraguan people to the evangelistic campaign, the Marxist government quickly changed course, Hancock noted.
“[On] November the 11th, we had over 200,000 people in the National Plaza,” he remembered. “We had 6,000 evangelical churches working together. That’s a pretty massive movement. [T]hey just responded normally. They’re paranoid over anything that they perceive to be a threat to their power base and anything that could turn into a political movement to overthrow them. We had no interest in politics.”
Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.
