Long before it was confiscated by President Daniel Ortega’s government in mid-August, the Jesuit-run University of Central America in Nicaragua was a special place for the hundreds whose minds and lives it transformed.
“The university was the one center of independent thought left within the country,” said Juan Diego Barberena, a lawyer who fled to Costa Rica. He studied on the institution, often known as UCA, between 2014 and 2017.
Ortega’s government described the university as a “center of terrorism” and seized its property, buildings and bank accounts on August 16. Every week later, the Jesuit religious order was declared illegal and all of its assets were confiscated. A recent institution would replace UCA, though further details are still unclear.
“This is a government policy that systematically violates human rights and appears to be aimed toward consolidating a totalitarian state,” the Society of Jesus of Central America said in an announcement.
Since December 2021, at the very least 26 Nicaraguan universities have been closed in an identical manner.
“UCA’s closure responds to the position it took during protests in 2018: to be on the side of the individuals who were suffering repression and demanding substantial changes,” Barberena said.
Founded by Jesuits in 1960, UCA had historically rejected authoritarianism and offered support for college students committed to fighting for deep social transformations.
“The Revolution (1979-1990) can’t be explained without the colleges, UCA included,” said Daisy Zamora, a poet and former vice minister of culture who currently lives within the United States. She became a student at UCA in 1967.
Zamora recalls that, even after receiving her primary education in a spiritual school, UCA expanded her social vocation and political awareness. Eager to fight for her country and overthrow Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship, she and fellow classmates joined a student branch of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which ended the Somoza dynasty in 1979 and established a revolutionary government.
“The Jesuits were very open to students expressing themselves politically,” Zamora said. “UCA was a hotbed where resistance actions against the dictatorship were being developed. It was like a small republic where students exercised democracy.”
Four many years later, in 2018, UCA became a hub for protests against Ortega, and its rector participated in peace talks that eventually failed. The recent confiscation of the university, which enrolled greater than 8,000 students, follows a series of increasingly authoritarian actions by the federal government against the Catholic Church and opposition figures.
A human rights organization, Nicaragua Nunca Más, estimates that greater than 50 religious leaders have fled within the last five years. In 2022, two congregations of nuns were expelled, and in February, an outspoken critic of Ortega’s government, Bishop Rolando Álvarez, was sentenced to 26 years in prison. A month later, the Vatican closed its embassy after Nicaragua proposed suspending diplomatic relations.
“When I discovered in regards to the closure of UCA, I began crying,” said María Gómez, a journalist who fled to Spain. She graduated with a communications degree in 2017.
She first heard about UCA at age 11 and becoming a student was her lifelong dream. When she got in with a full scholarship, she was overcome with joy. “I couldn’t pay the schooling despite the proven fact that it was low-cost, about 2 or 3 dollars, but for a family with limited resources, that was plenty of money.”
In 2018, she joined protests through which peasants and former students demanded government motion to stop the burning of an environmental reserve.
“We felt secure since the teachers didn’t interfere, but they gave us freedom to create banners, to collect, and even protected us,” Gomez said. “When the police began to attack the demonstrators, they opened the gates of UCA for us.”
“Some of my professors — who were Jesuits — approached refugees within the cathedral and other universities to hope, to bless them,” she added. “And they told us: You are the longer term of this country. Do not be discouraged.”
UCA’s influence on youth went beyond its classrooms. Ernesto Medina, a past student and former rector on the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua in town of León, said that colleagues from UCA modified the best way he considered his own Christianity greater than 50 years ago.
“I had social concerns, but they were the standard ones that Catholic schools instilled in us,” said Medina, who now lives in Germany. “We would go to a poor neighborhood to distribute food, clothes, to check with people. But the comrades from Managua seriously questioned the dictatorship and the necessity for a deep social transformation.”
According to Medina, the Seventies were decisive for his country. The military stopped attempts to develop guerrilla groups inspired by the Cuban Revolution within the mountains. Therefore, the FSLN penetrated urban areas.
“UCA played an important role back then, because a generation of boys were influenced by the Jesuits of the time,” Medina said. “What mobilized the vast majority of the Nicaraguan population was a mix of Christian ideas that were highly committed to the people and revolutionary ideas that ended up prevailing.”
For retired military member Roberto Samcam, who served as major within the Sandinista Popular Army and have become an engineer at UCA within the Seventies, the university is woven into the material of Nicaraguan society.
Ortega himself spent a couple of months as a student at UCA before devoting himself to the revolution. And in an event that now seems ironic, the university granted him an honorary doctorate for his “contribution to peace and democracy” after accepting an electoral defeat in 1990. He got here back to power in 2007 and has governed Nicaragua ever since.
“What he’s stealing is greater than a campus, greater than university degrees,” Samcam said.
Other former students agree. Barberena fears for the fate of the Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America, which was housed by UCA and is taken into account the important documentation and memory center within the country. Gómez worries the press clippings that documented the revolution, which she read endlessly during her spare time at UCA, could be lost.
“For me, it was the one university that taught students easy methods to grow to be critical and respect one another,” Gómez said. “And by losing that, we lose all the things.”
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