Q24N (EFE) The President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, revealed on Monday that his Nicaraguan counterpart, Daniel Ortega, has not answered his calls since Pope Francis asked him to advocate for the situation of a bishop in that country.
“I spoke with the Pope and he asked me to speak with Ortega about a bishop who was imprisoned,” Lula said in an interview with foreign correspondents, in relation to the Nicaraguan Bishop Rolando Álvarez, imprisoned for his opposition to the Nicaraguan Government.
“The specific thing is that Ortega did not answer the phone and did not want to talk to me. So, I never spoke to him again,” he added.
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Lula regretted that this happened with “a guy who made a revolution like the one Ortega made to defeat (Anastasio) Somoza” and said that today he does not know if that revolution was “because he wanted power or because he wanted to improve the lives of his people.”
The Brazilian president said he was in favor of “alternating power” in every country because it is “the healthiest thing” for a democracy.
According to Lula, “when a leader gets it into his head that he is essential or irreplaceable, that is when the spirit of the dictator begins to be born.”
Álvarez (Rolando José Álvarez Lagos), who served as the Bishop of Matagalpa, Nicaragua, since 2011 and apostolic administrator of Estelí since 2021, and a longtime opponent of the Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, was sentenced to 26 years in prison for “conspiracy to attack national integrity” and “dissemination of false news.”
On January 14, 2024, Ortega freed Álvarez and expelled him from Nicaragua. Álvarez, Bishop Mora, 15 priests, and 2 seminarians were exiled to Vatican City.
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