Nicaragua: Evangelical Pastors Describe Their Prison Ordeal

They thought they were in good with the government, then…

Five of the 11 pastors from Mountain Gateway, a Texas based ministry, described their ordeal in the Nicaraguan prison. They were eventually released and banished from Nicaragua by the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship.

By Confidencial

HAVANA TIMES – “You’ll never get out of here;” “You’re all crazy,” the guards at Nicaragua’s La Modelo prison mockingly told the group of eleven pastors from the Texas-based Mountain Gateway Ministry [Puerta de la Montaña]. The religious leaders were arrested in December 2023, accused of money laundering.

The pastors, who were stripped of their nationality in 2024, spent nine months in the Nicaraguan prison, kept apart from the common prisoners. They were denied the right to a Bible, they drank dirty water, and at times even ate food from the garbage, according to their own words.

Five of the eleven pastors shared descriptions of their time in prison at the non-denominational Covenant Love Church in North Carolina, where some of the Mountain Gateway pastors have been resettled with their families after being banished from Nicaragua on September 9, 2024. All of them were robbed of their assets after being declared stateless.

“They took us away like the worst criminals, and without telling us anything,” they recalled. Their testimony was transmitted on the US Church’s YouTube channel on March 18, 2025.

Following a bogus trial, during which their lawyers were not allowed to examine the files or to speak with them, the Evangelical pastors were sentenced to over ten years in jail.

The Mountain Gateway Church was at first well regarded by the Ortega-Murillo regime. In contrast to the Catholic Church, which was being persecuted, the evangelical group was allowed to hold large events. Before the pastors were jailed, Mountain Gateway held a massive gathering to close their “Good News Nicaragua Crusade 2023” campaign. The closing ceremony was held at Managua’s Juan Pablo II Plaza with the presence of over 250,000 people. One month later, on December 17, 2023, everything suddenly changed.

“I had to travel for two hours from the spot where I was detained with my brother, Pastor Marcos. They transported us in a police vehicle and we reached the destination still without knowing what was happening,” Pastor Juan Carlos Chavarria Zapata recalled.

“To our surprise, the first thing they told us was: “Take off all your clothes and stand there,” in front of all the officers, both men and women. Because the first thing they do is break down your soul completely. That was a shock. Then they gave us that uniform, without telling us what was going on,” Chavarria described.

“We had to eat garbage”

Pastor Marcos Hernandez had been serving in Protestant Churches for over 35 years when he was arrested. He and his wife were pastors at two Chinandega temples, and over the course of their lives had founded another twelve churches, plus three radio stations and an elementary school. They even had plans to create a university. All of these properties were confiscated after they were expelled from the country and stripped of their nationality.

“Today, I am stateless, but as the Apostol Paul said: “our citizenship is in heaven,” Hernandez affirmed. “I don’t have any property; what I had – which was for my children – ended up with the Government, as well as the radios, the non-profit status, everything,” he added.

Hernandez was held in La Modelo’s maximum security cells. “I lost my appetite; I lost some 120 pounds. For almost three months, I was sick. I passed the time by praying, even with the sorrow. Conditions there aren’t designed for you to feel good,” he commented.

“There were moments when we were sick and had to eat from the garbage. But even so, we knew that God was with us in that place.”

“They gave us dirty water”

Pastor Alvaro Escobar doesn’t understand how it could be that after participating in the “greatest evangelizing crusade” Nicaragua had ever seen, they were “locked up in jail, completely isolated from the rest.”

“That period was terrible. The water we drank was very bad, and there was a strange film on top. We had to pray, so we wouldn’t get sick,” he recalled.

The religious leader told of one time that he was going to bathe when he saw, “a huge scorpion on the plastic bucket of water that I was going to pour over my body. Because there [in jail] you lay down and scorpions and cockroaches fell down on you. So, you had to choose: either you cover yourself with something, or you wake up with bites all over your body. It’s a battle you fight every day.”

Pastor Harry Lening Rios was one of the three pastors who was separated off from the rest of the religious leaders for the seven months. “The hardest part wasn’t being in prison, but not seeing my family: my wife, my children and my mother. It wasn’t the food, although we ate very badly, but that was nothing compared to not seeing them.”

They all agreed that prayer gave them the strength to endure the time in prison. “They believed they were going to silence our mouths and put out our fire by putting us in that place. We were in a maximum-security cell, but the fire didn’t go out, the fire got bigger than the problems,” assured Pastor Jose Luis Orozco.

“We were in a place where no one could see us. Only special officers could see us. They brought us our food. The common prisoners couldn’t see us. There were seven thousand prisoners there, but we were in a place that was completely isolated,” Orozco stressed.

They spent the months in prison praying and preaching, he explained. “The first months, we preached to each other, but later we preached to the rest of the prisoners that they were bringing in.

“When they began to bring in other prisoners to the different cells in our area, a very important thing happened: God began to touch other prisoners. There were prisoners who received Christ as their savior and not only that, also Police officers,” Pastor Harry Rios recounted. Pastor Rios highlighted: “One day, the head of the [Prison] System came and told us: ‘You are the light in this area. If you get discouraged, everyone here is going to get discouraged. You are the light.’”

“Within the jail we held many fasts. One time we fasted for three days, asking God to speak to us, even if only in our dreams,” stated Pastor Alvaro Escobar.

The Pastors were freed with other political prisoners

The Pastors were released and sent to Guatemala, together with another 124 political prisoners of the Ortega-Murillo regime. “The day they took us out, I remember, we were getting ready, because every day we held [prayer] services,” Pastor Harry Rios commented. “They gathered all the pastors and told us: “put on your uniforms.” They loaded us onto a bus and took us to another place,” he explained.

They traveled in a closed bus, according to Pastor Marcos Hernandez, who thought “they were taking us to a worse place.” However, his fears lessened when “two US citizens got on the bus and told us, ‘We’re here because we’ve come to help you, we want you to be freed.’”

“When we left that place, all of us pastors embraced. We knew that was the last day we were going to spend there and that’s how it was. The happiest day after I was freed was when I could finally see my wife and my children,” noted Pastor Jose Luis Orozco.

First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.

Read more from Nicaragua here on Havana Times.