Students seeking refuge in a Catholic church in Nicaragua were shot at by police earlier this month.
The armed police killed two students and wounded dozens of others.
The students had been occupying the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua during two months of protests against President Daniel Ortega’s government. They were protesting particularly against Ortega’s pension reforms and increasingly authoritarian rule.
After police forced them out of the university, some students rang their parents to say goodbye. They were sure that they were going to die.
Others called Divine Mercy parish priest, Father Raul Zamora.
Zamora suggested they take refuge in the Divine Mercy church.
Parish priest Father Raul Zamora says he decided to offer sanctuary to 150 students after paramilitary opened fire on their protest earlier this month.
He says prayer (the divine mercy chaplet and the rosary) sustained them through over 15 hours of gunfire that followed.
“That university is actually under my pastoral care,” said Zamora. “It is right next to our parish. I am in charge of attending to those students spiritually. I knew the students personally.”
“I told them, ‘Come to the parish. Come to the parish. Don’t stay there,’” said the priest.
Students began to arrive at the church in groups.
Zamora and other church staff made several trips over to the university to search for the wounded.
Police and paramilitary were continuing to attack the campus.
“Every time the students tried to go into the parish cars, they would start shooting,” said Zamora.
He thought that the students would be safe once they were in the church, but then the paramilitary gunfire was directed at the parish itself.
Joshua Partlow, a Washington Post reporter who had been covering the protests, ended up taking refuge along with the students in the church.
He says the students “carried the wounded into the Rev. Raul Zamora’s rectory and put them on chairs or on the blood-spattered tile floor.”
“Not long after 6 p.m…. the paramilitaries had appeared, cutting off the only exit from Divine Mercy and firing at the remaining barricade just outside the church. It became clear that everyone inside . . . would not be going anywhere.”
Everyone remained in the church overnight. Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes Solorzano and Archbishop Waldemar Sommertag, the apostolic nuncio, were then able to negotiate the students’ release.
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