By Paul Jeffrey

Managua - The corruption scandal swirling around former Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Aleman, who faces charges of stealing more than $100 million from state coffers, has also enveloped several of the country’s Catholic bishops and brought church-state relations in this Central American country to a bitter impasse.

Unlike ideologically-based past conflicts, the current spat results from the church’s refusal to accept the curtailment of privileges it enjoyed under past governments. As a result, the campaign of current President Enrique Bolaños to combat public corruption has implicated the church in one scandal after another.

Nicaraguans are accustomed to church-state discord. During the 1980s, conservative church leaders clashed frequently with the leftist Sandinistas, who had taken power in a 1979 insurrection. The Sandinistas gave progressive priests cabinet posts and public prominence. Yet in their corner the bishops could count on Pope John Paul II, who vehemently rejected liberation theology and revolutionary struggle. The clash took on dramatic overtones when the Sandinistas closed a church radio station and expelled a bishop, while John Paul delivered his famous finger-wagging reproach to Ernesto Cardenal as the Sandinista priest attempted to kiss the pope’s ring while kneeling on the tarmac of the Managua airport.

Yet even during the heady days of the Sandinista Revolution, most of the Catholic Church’s historic privileges remained unchallenged. It didn’t pay taxes and could bring into the country whatever it wanted without paying customs duties. Those privileges continued during the governments of President Violeta Chamorro (1990-1997) and Aleman (1997-2002).

Yet under Aleman, whose personal wealth skyrocketed during his term, a segment of the church provided unprecedented backing to the president, even when it became clear he was a crook. Indeed, some church leaders provided “excessive public support that tried to cover up the corruption,” said María López Vigil, director of Envio, a monthly magazine of analysis published at the Jesuit-run Central American University here.

“Corruption reached its climax during Aleman’s government, and the bishops, rather than denouncing it, were importing hundreds of luxury cars without paying taxes, and the government was repairing the bishops’ cars and paying for their gasoline. Aleman named church people to government posts where they could make money. Eddy Montenegro [vicar of the Managua Archdiocese] was named to the board of directors of the airport, for example, where he received $500 for each meeting he attended. Yet he knew nothing about airports,” López Vigil told The Tablet.

One of Aleman’s last acts before giving up the presidency a year ago was to emit a postage stamp with the image of Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the archbishop of Managua and president of the Nicaraguan Episcopal Conference. For many, it was a reward for the years of complicity. “The stamp honored the church’s passivity, its unprecedented tolerance and lack of prophetic vision when confronted by a corrupt government that had stolen from the poor and the peasants. The government gave a prize to the church for being silent, for failing to demand justice,” said Sixto Ulloa, a Baptist pastor and politician.

When Bolaños, who once served as Aleman’s vice president, took over the presidency, he quickly started implementing his campaign promise to put an end to government corruption. The International Monetary Fund, dangling debt relief before the new president, encouraged Bolaños to end the elite’s routine evasion of duties and taxes, a practice that leaves the government with fewer resources to spend on social services in a country where 67.4 percent of the population lives on less than $2 per day.

Bolaños’ main target quickly became Aleman. For months, government prosecutors labored in vain to get him before a judge but were foiled by the Aleman’s parliamentary immunity; as a former president, he holds a seat in Nicaragua’s National Assembly. Yet in December his fellow deputies stripped him of his immunity, and two Managua judges ordered him held, pending trial, under house arrest on his coffee plantation south of the capital.

The government’s anti-corruption campaign also set Bolaños on a collision course with the church. One of the first signs of the conflict came when the education minister cancelled some government scholarships for the Redemptoris Mater Catholic University (UNICA) south of the capital city, claiming that financial assistance had been awarded based on political connections rather than need or merit.

Run directly by Obando, UNICA was established in government office buildings given to it by Chamorro in 1992. Under the cardinal’s tutelage, it offered wealthy families a conservative environment for their children. Yet UNICA began losing prestige in the late 1990s because of Obando’s unquestioning support for Aleman. The Pellas family, the country’s richest clan, which owns the local Toyota agency and Nicaragua’s premier rum distillery, withdrew its significant financial support for UNICA because of the cardinal’s chumminess with the embarrassingly corrupt president.

In addition to cutting government support to UNICA, Bolaños’ government started examining the church’s legal status, or lack thereof. It quickly narrowed its sites on the archdiocesan social service agency, Coprosa, which had never registered with any government. Government investigators discovered that during the Aleman administration Coprosa had imported more than $60 million in material without paying any duties. Dozens of vehicles were imported tax-free by the church agency, several of which ended up in the possession of the Centeno Roque brothers, a well-known pair of wealthy scam artists whose photos are featured on wanted posters in police stations throughout the country.

The Bishop of Leon, Bosco Vivas, was one of those who imported a luxury vehicle tax-free, paid for by a credit note from Aleman’s tax chief, Byron Jerez, who currently resides in a Managua prison convicted of theft from the state. Bishop Juan Abelardo Mata of Esteli wrote the trial judge a letter urging that Jerez be released from prison on his own recognizance.

Other church leaders have also been caught up in the corruption scandal. Local reporters sniffing through government records discovered that Amado Peña, a Managua priest close to Obando, received three checks in 2001 totaling $61,000 from the government communications agency. The checks were signed by Salvador Quintanilla, Aleman’s communications director who today is in prison for fraud. One of the checks was in payment for Peña’s presence at a service for some skeletons discovered at a Managua construction site. Peña used the burial mass to claim the bones were those of political prisoners massacred by the Sandinistas. Archeologists later identified the bones as belonging to pre-Colombian residents of the area.

Peña has refused to comment on the government money, much less give it back. Yet Father Montenegro, while keeping his airport board money, did respond to public criticism by returning $20,000 that he received, allegedly for church building repairs, from the government’s Supreme Electoral Council (CSE).

The CSE is headed by Roberto Rivas, the son of Obando’s longtime housekeeper. Rivas was also head of Coprosa from 1981 until 2000 and vice rector of UNICA until 2000, despite his ostentatious lifestyle, which has long served as a lightening rod for criticism. Rivas’ mansion south of the capital is built on land donated in 1986 to the archdiocese for social programs. Police say he sent two of his Mercedes Benz automobiles across the border into Honduras to protect them from seizure after Bolaños’ corruption fighters started sniffing around his personal affairs. And he may lose a yacht that he imported at the end of 2001; investigators cannot find the paperwork that should have been filled out when he brought the boat into the country without paying taxes.

In recent years Rivas has turned the CSE into center of political patronage, giving jobs to all sorts of out of work supporters of Aleman, as well as unemployed allies of former President Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader who over recent years has crafted several private and public pacts with Aleman that benefitted the followers of both political bosses. Rivas was recently reelected president of the CSE, though government prosecutors warn they may soon file charges against him.

In October, the simmering church-state feud took a dramatic turn when police and army troops seized the broadcast studios and antenna of La Poderosa, a Managua radio station founded by Coprosa during the time that Rivas ran the church agency and Aleman the government. Yet rather than broadcast religious programming, La Poderosa was handed over to a group of Aleman cronies and became the voice of the embattled former president. Before being forced off the air, the radio station regularly attacked and even threatened President Bolaños. In a country where political rhetoric is routinely vituperative, La Poderosa had simply gone too far, forcing Bolaños to respond. Government officials cited Coprosa’s illegal status and noted that all of the station’s equipment had been imported by the church without paying taxes or even formally requesting exemption from duties.

Church officials were furious about the closure. Yet their appeals for condemnation of the government’s actions drew only meager support. Many took Bolaños’ side. “If the church had used the concession of the station’s frequency to extend the field of its evangelization, these problems wouldn’t have occurred. On the contrary, it acted against the Gospel by broadcasting messages that had nothing to do with evangelization,” said Sergio Garcia, a Liberal Party official who was once an ally of Aleman but who now opposes the former president.

Throughout the chain of scandals, church officials have refused to admit any wrongdoing, and Obando has repeatedly called for “national dialogue,” suggesting that Aleman be forgiven his sins and not punished. The cardinal even dispatched Bishops Vivas and Mata to Washington in August to lobby the U.S. government to pressure Bolaños to back off on prosecuting the former president. Yet Washington is publicly on Bolaños’ side, and the bishops were only received by low-level officials in the State Department, reportedly angering Obando, who had long found common cause with the U.S. government.

Such an appeal for outside intervention certainly has precedence here. Obando has charged that Bolaños sent emissaries to the Vatican to urge Pope John Paul II to accept the resignation of Obando, who turned 75 in 2001 and submitted his resignation as required by church law. Yet Vatican officials have yet to act on it. On December 10, Bolaños appeared in a joint press conference with Obando to deny the charge. “I have guaranteed his reverend eminence on various occasions that on the part of the government, and on my part, no one has gone to carry out this kind of request,” Bolaños said.

Yet Father Bismarck Carballo, a spokesperson for Obando, said the church “has very strong information” that the diplomatic mission was indeed sent to Rome.

Even some long-time friends of Obando seem to be turning on the cardinal. Humberto Belli, rector of the Ave Maria College of the Americas in San Marcos, was a ferocious defender of Obando during the prelate’s tiffs with the Sandinistas. An Opus Dei militant, Belli was in Rome in October for the canonization of Josemaría Escriva, and church leaders here claim he took advantage of the visit to lobby for Obando’s removal.

Belli claims he only chatted with several friends in the curia about possible replacements for the cardinal, yet he makes no secret of his current discomfort with Obando. “I’ve made public before my concern as a Catholic, something shared by many Catholics in Nicaragua, regarding the silence of our hierarchy about the acts of corruption of the past administration, and the impression that the hierarchy seemed a bit inclined toward former President Aleman. That type of attitude damages the church in Nicaragua,” Belli said.

Carballo said the grumbling about Obando comes from those who want to weaken the church’s influence. As proof of that, he cited the “Nueva Era” slogan of Bolaños’ presidential campaign.

“There’s a philosophical-religious movement called la nueva era, or new age, which has picked up a lot of strength in Nicaragua. There’s an orchestration by various sectors that want to implement this philosophy, which would mean that the church loses its leadership to other sectors which claim they have more credibility than the Catholic Church, and which want to implement a model that the pope has called savage capitalism. That’s very different from the doctrine of the church, which wants to put a human face on the economy and attend to the promotion of all persons, especially the poorest,” Carballo said.

López Vigil suggested the church has brought its woes on itself. “In this country there has never been much order in the public administration, and the Catholic Church, as one of the most powerful sectors in the country, lived surrounded by privilege. It’s always been that way, even during the Revolution, despite all the political differences between the bishops and the Sandinistas. And then along comes Bolaños, who comes from the business world, and he wants to put the government’s administrative house in order by doing away with corruption. That has provoked a head-on collision with this whole world of privilege and those who benefit from it,” she said.

Although Obando, Vivas and Mata have remained outspoken in their support of Aleman and publicly critical of Bolaños, the country’s other eight bishops have been more reserved and have politely kept a distance from the public feud, not wanting to suffer for their colleagues’ political activism. Several privately chafe at Obando’s unconditional defense of Aleman. The papal nuncio, Jean-Paul Gobel, has also kept quiet, including in September when he refused to intervene despite’s Aleman’s personal appeal for international condemnation of the government after the former president was ousted from his seat as leader of the country’s parliament, the first step on the road that lead to the eventual loss of his immunity.

The corruption scandals involving church leaders, along with the cardinal’s defiant support for Aleman, have cost the church both political capital and financial support. Obando has lately had to make the rounds of international organizations with his hand out for money. Yet many funders say they are unwilling to give the church money as long as it fails to clean up its own house.

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