Attorney Martha Patricia Molina endures her exile in Texas, where, a few years ago, she began documenting the attacks on the Catholic Church in Nicaragua in a small room in Houston. What started as a personal record soon evolved into a crucial study exposing the repression of religious freedom under the Ortega-Murillo regime. Despite the fear of retaliation against her family, struggling with depression in the U.S., and seeking comfort from her patron saint, Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, she persevered, refusing to succumb to complete self-censorship. Along the way, she found unexpected solace in a Mexican fast food kitchen, returned to her legal work, reconnected with her loved ones, and learned to let go of her anger toward God
Amid the quesadillas, burritos, and red and green salsas that Martha Patricia Molina learned to cook in the Mexican restaurant where she worked in Texas, the pambazo was the dish that stood out the most to her: a type of sandwich made with soft, white bread, filled with refried beans, chorizo with potatoes, longaniza, lettuce, chipotle adobo, or puyas, depending on the region of Mexico where it’s eaten, but always soaked in a vibrant red guajillo chile sauce. A must. The Tex-Mex diners preferred it filled with shredded beef. For her, the filling didn’t matter as much as the appearance of the pambazo—how it looked when finished—specifically because of its shape and color: it reminded her of an enchilada, a fried tortilla stuffed with rice and ground beef, as made in Nicaraguan street food. The resemblance between these otherwise different dishes provided brief moments of comfort in that hectic kitchen as she dealt with the depression that had been weighing on her since mid-2021, when her forced exile to the United States began. An exile without her two children, without her mother, her cats… Alone, with persistent prayers to her patron saint, Padre Pio, because, in those days, to be honest with herself, she was pretty angry with God.
Martha Patricia tells me from Houston, where she no longer works in the Tex-Mex kitchen but at an organization handling immigration cases before U.S. courts. She has returned to practicing law in exile. Although forced exile often leads people to different types of jobs for survival, she never stopped feeling like a lawyer and professor.
Even less did she stop feeling the urgent need to communicate and criticize what she deemed unjust, just as she did on her radio show in Nicaragua on Radio Corporación. That’s why, when she left the restaurant—after making dozens of pambazos, quesadillas, and burritos—she would go home and continue working on a document she simply calls “the PDF.” A document in which she was recording the violations that Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo’s regime had been committing against the Catholic Church since 2020: desecration of temples, banning of religious processions, the banishment of bishops and priests, arrests of clergy members, theft of church property, closure of Catholic media outlets, freezing of clergy bank accounts, stripping of legal statuses, and even the denationalization of religious figures…
At that time, the Ortega-Murillo crusade against Catholicism—and now extended to some evangelical churches—was already fierce, but it hadn’t yet gained the international recognition that a group of United Nations experts would later give it: crimes against humanity in the context of relentless religious persecution. This persecution reached the surreal during Holy Week 2023, when the dictatorship confined the Nicaraguan religious to “church arrest.” Long before the U.N. experts published their report, it was the document that Martha Patricia compiled in her exile that first highlighted the systematic nature and depth of this religious persecution.
Martha Patricia recounts this with no ostentation, as if describing a hobby of collecting and organizing data on her computer. I speak with her after several weeks of rescheduling our interview sessions. Between her work as a lawyer assisting migrants in Texas, caring for her youngest son—dropping him off and picking him up from school—and the responsibilities that documenting and recording the religious persecution have brought her, finding time in her schedule is difficult. Just before her exile, the attorney—who also served as Director of Continuing Education at American College University—was working on a project about corruption in the Comptroller’s Office and Sandinista mayors. In other words, collecting public data. But she says she made a “mistake” that made her vulnerable…
Martha Patricia recalls, and I am taken aback… I’m immediately tempted to say: “Maybe it was naive of you, an overdose of honesty, or a slip that in a dictatorship that kills and imprions can be fatal.” But why bother? She’s safe from prison in the U.S…. and, after all, doing the right thing, what the law allows, shouldn’t be wrong. I just listen. But it’s important to clarify why I had that thought… When she made those requests, it was a sensitive time: June 2021, a year when Ortega-Murillo’s repression intensified, a peak not seen since the social protests of 2018. The regime imprisoned all the former presidential candidates, opposition leaders, businesspeople, journalists, activists, and anyone daring to contradict the government or question public institutions, like her, who already had a public profile not only from her radio show, but also as a columnist for La Prensa. Criticism is a sin for which the dictators of El Carmen have multiple hells for punishment, the top three being: El Chipote, La Modelo, or the cells of District III.
By November of that year, general elections were scheduled, but the presidential couple wasn’t willing to risk their absolute power in a process where all predictions were against them. So, they chose to dismantle all spaces and consolidate a totalitarian regime, aiming for dynastic succession. Starting in May of that year, police hunts and another wave of exiles followed. Martha Patricia’s exile was unique in how it happened. In June, she had to travel to the U.S. for medical reasons. While she was undergoing medical checkups in Texas, the Comptroller’s Office and the municipalities responded to her public information requests in Managua, sending police officers to her home. Her two children were there, under the care of her elderly mother.
Martha Patricia says, her voice breaking as she recalls that day. She stopped publishing critical pieces about the Ortega-Murillo regime in the media and on her social media. She silenced herself out of fear they might harm her children and her mother, who most urged her to self-censor. That’s when depression set in, and she decided to find work in Texas after her family warned her not to even think about returning to Nicaragua. She accepted her exile. She wept incessantly and got angry with God.
Weeks passed, and her loved ones in Texas encouraged her to leave her room. Exile, an unprecedented condition for her, had now left her unemployed. She had lost her jobs in Nicaragua and had to venture out. She accepted the first job she found: in the Tex-Mex kitchen, where she discovered the pambazo.
When someone is exiled and can continue working in what they love and are passionate about, I think they can consider themselves lucky. Not every profession allows for this, and every circumstance is different. However, most of those exiled since 2018 end up working in other fields, especially in service jobs, as Uber drivers or delivery workers… And it’s a great loss for Nicaragua because we’re talking about students and professionals. What’s called a “brain drain,” but in reality, it’s a forced exodus driven by Ortega-Murillo.
In 2019, when the number of exiles and migrants expelled by the sociopolitical crisis hadn’t yet reached a million as it has today in 2024, the Arias Foundation for Peace revealed in a report that 53% of exiles in Costa Rica were students and professionals. How high might that percentage be now, not just in Costa Rica, but in the United States, Spain, and other countries where Nicaraguans have fled? There’s no data at this moment, but the point I want to make is this: continuing your profession abroad is a way to defend your dignity, which is precisely what the dictatorship seeks to break when they expel us from our homeland.
For Martha Patricia, continuing to document in her “PDF” was a way not to abandon her professional identity… or in her words, a way to “not go crazy,” to keep “writing and researching,” even if it didn’t make any sense while working as a cook in Texas. But she held on to that determination in the room where she cried over her forced exile: typing on her laptop until one day, she saw that the document had grown, and she felt the need to do something with it. The lawyer decided to show it to her usual editor, who suggested turning it into a study. Transforming it from a personal log of the repression against Catholicism into a publication with academic standards for the public interest of the database.
She reluctantly agreed, worried about the possibility that her family could be harmed by the regime in Nicaragua. It’s hard to deal with silence when one holds strong life convictions. The dilemma of whether to stay silent or continue denouncing persists, especially when that famous quote from Gandhi in his trial for sedition keeps echoing: “Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.” These are complex personal decisions that, unfortunately, always put loved ones at risk. In Martha Patricia’s case, the conviction to take the risk wasn’t only about her professional self, but also about her loyalty to the Catholic Church… an institution that has shaped her life as a secular lawyer, deeply immersed in Christianity and what she often repeats: “love for others.”
Martha Patricia Molina’s grandmother was very devoted to Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, one of Italy’s most popular saints, who, after much controversy, was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002. Padre Pio was an exorcist priest, known for his miraculous healings. However, the mystery and aura surrounding him stemmed from the wounds on his hands, which he hid with gloves. These were wounds identical to those of Jesus Christ, according to his followers, and whose blood was said to emit the scent of flowers. That fragrance, they claim, is associated with holiness. Padre Pio was both revered and persecuted by the Vatican, which at one point accused him of fraud regarding his wounds and his miracles. Yet, the opposition didn’t discourage him. His greatest work on Earth came during the height of World War II when, despite the war, he managed to build and found the “House for the Relief of Suffering” hospital, a sanctuary for both spiritual and physical healing.
She was born into a Catholic family on February 13, 1981, and nearly died due to severe bleeding. Although she doesn’t know which saint her family prayed to in order to save her, she doesn’t doubt it was Padre Pio. The doctors managed to save her. She grew up in the Altagracia neighborhood in Managua, and her earliest memories are of a country engulfed in “horror”: the war of the 1980s between the Sandinista Revolution and the Contra. It was a decade in which the revolutionary government also clashed with Catholicism, even jeering Pope John Paul II in a public square, a fierce critic of communism.
Her father, who years later had to go to the United States to financially support the family, enrolled her in María Mazzarello School, where education was deeply rooted in Christian principles. Despite this, she didn’t spend her teenage years or young adulthood actively participating in Mass. She almost never attended church. In fact, she completed high school at the evangelical Baptist College, but that didn’t alter her Catholic foundation. She was always curious in class: she initially studied international relations at the American University (UAM) but didn’t feel satisfied with that major. It was during that time that she understood the concept of human rights, which led her to pursue law. She enrolled at the Central American University (UCA) but put her studies on hold to take a scholarship in Spain, where she completed a master’s in corruption and the rule of law at the University of Salamanca. However, she returned to Nicaragua—”where I’ve always wanted to serve,” she insists—to graduate in law.
In the 2000s, she fell in love, had children, and began working as a lawyer and public notary. Martha Patricia focused on family law. But she always wanted to do more, to have an impact beyond the courtroom. She started a show on Radio Corporación called Dialoguemos, a kind of radio clinic where listeners could ask questions about legal matters, child support, and human rights. After 2006, when Ortega returned to power, she felt “more informed” and began to criticize the growing authoritarian tendencies of the Sandinista leader and his wife, Rosario Murillo. Not just on the radio, but also as a columnist for La Prensa. After the social protests erupted in 2018, her superiors at American College reprimanded her for her activism.
Martha Patricia explains, jumping ahead to the years leading up to 2018, the April crisis, and the massacre of over 350 people carried out by police and paramilitaries loyal to Ortega-Murillo. By then, she had reconnected with Catholicism, but in a much more intense way. She began attending church “militantly”: Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays, processions, Stations of the Cross, and praying the rosary. But there was more… they told her that if she wanted to “be the Church,” she needed to get more involved in the pastoral activities of the Archdiocese of Managua.
–I was a member of the communications team. If there was an event at Radio María, I was there. If it was at the Church of El Carmen, I was there. I eventually became the parish’s communication agent. I got to know many nuns, priests, and Church friends all over the country, without realizing how much that would help me later. I remember at that time, there was the archdiocesan synod. I was taking a training course, but then the 2018 events started…”
She pauses for a long time. Martha Patricia takes a breath, as if preparing to dive into complex, heartbreaking memories. On April 18, she was broadcasting Let’s Walk Together, part of the synod. The crowd was waiting for Bishop Silvio Báez to give a talk, but he never arrived. Everyone was surprised because Báez was known for his punctuality and intellect. They then announced that the talk was canceled due to “disturbances” that prevented him from attending. When the lawyer got into her car to go home, she heard on the radio that there were protests near Camino de Oriente. She changed directions and went to protest. (Her Church would follow suit in May 2018: after trying to mediate between protesters and the authoritarian government, they took the side of the victims, denouncing the repression, which, according to a UN expert panel, amounted to crimes against humanity).
Martha Patricia Molina insists it was hard not to feel anguish for others in 2018: young people beaten, with eyes shot out by police rubber bullets; elderly people with their heads split open by mobs; gunfire! The first shots at Darwin Urbina’s throat at Upoli and Álvaro Conrado… The brains of Franco Valdivia and Orlando Pérez splattered on the central park floor of Estelí. Fatal shots: to necks, torsos, skulls… The mortality of youth. San Pío’s wounds oozing painful blood over Nicaraguans. The imprisonment of thousands for thinking differently, torture in prisons, sexual abuse in cells, attacks on bishops in Carazo. It was hard not to feel angry, to cry, to fear, not to criticize… That’s what the lawyer did from 2018 in the Radio Corporación booth until the paramilitaries came to threaten her, to take pictures of her, to warn her. It happened while she was working on her investigation into corruption in the Comptroller’s Office and Sandinista municipalities. In mid-2021, she had to travel to the United States for health reasons—unintentionally and without wanting to—finding herself unable to return to her homeland. Who knows for how long.
The depression that Martha Patricia Molina felt began to ease not only with Tex-Mex cooking and her pambazos but also because a friend urged her to go to church in Houston, to stop watching Mass through social media broadcasts. She listened. She left the room where she was working on the “PDF” on the assaults against the Catholic Church. She was also gifted Andy, a silver and white cat, purring and playful. These were ways to keep her mind occupied, to stop obsessively thinking about her children and mother, who remained in Nicaragua. How could she bring them to the United States?
The question was answered by the humanitarian parole approved by the Biden administration for Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and Cubans. Before requesting her loved ones, Martha Patricia started a political asylum process in the United States, but it hasn’t been approved yet. She continues in the process. But what does that delay matter when parole was approved for Samuel and Daniela? Daniela had ten months left to graduate as a lawyer when UCA was confiscated, and Samuel was in high school. They could reunite with their mother and end the terror she lived in Managua. A founded fear: before this family migration process, the lawyer had dared to publish, in May 2022, the first volume of the “PDF,” the study whose title came to her while praying the third mystery of the rosary in Houston.
Martha Patricia notes the coincidence. She recalls it gratefully, as if St. Pío had knocked on the door of heaven with her prayer carried by his wounded hands. She ceased to be angry with God. It was as if God responded this way to her work of denouncing the oppression. The study Nicaragua, a Persecuted Church now has five editions.
She never thought her work, which at first “had no goal,” would become a key compilation of the record of repression in Nicaragua, particularly against freedom of worship. A piece for the historical memory that the regime seeks to manipulate to impose its narrative, exacerbated by the confiscation of the archives of the Institute of History of UCA or the archives of La Prensa. A lay voice for the persecuted Church in a time of imposed silence. A mutism that has spread in the Vatican. Once, in March 2023, Pope Francis said that the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship was “grotesque and Hitlerian.” But after those statements, the “representative of God on earth” has scarcely referred to the crusade that his Church has suffered in Nicaragua. Meanwhile, his servants still suffer in the Central American country, waiting for the “Vicar of Christ” to embrace them more.
The Vatican has acknowledged the exile of dozens of priests to Rome, including Bishop Rolando Álvarez. Diplomatic sources and those close to the Holy See agree that Francis and his circle prefer to preserve what remains of the Church as an institution in Nicaragua rather than engage in a more direct confrontation that could lead to an explicit prohibition of Catholicism by the Ortega-Murillo regime. However, among priests and the bases of Catholicism, there are grievances with Pope Francis and even with bishops of the Episcopal Conference, similar to what Martha Patricia felt with God: “Why tolerate even the dismantling of an entire diocese like Matagalpa? Grievance after grievance and that silence that begins to sound from Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes. Why did the Holy See urge exiled priests and bishops like Silvio Báez to lower their voices?”
Despite Martha Patricia’s study documenting the magnitude of the Ortega-Murillo crusade against freedom of worship, particularly aimed at Catholicism, the Vatican’s diplomatic strategy is diluted by its mutism in the face of a regime that is repressive of clerics… or, the more extreme insist, in the posture of “turning the other cheek” to protect the pastoral presence they still have in a predominantly Catholic, apostolic, and Roman country.
Martha Patricia also has doubts about what the Vatican plans for Nicaragua. But since she reunited with her children and mother, she has regained the freedom to express her opinions on religious persecution. Her work in organizing support for migrants and collaborating with her family to establish themselves in Houston has brought stability to her life.
The lawyer’s family lives in a small apartment, and she has bought several pots with water plants to decorate it. These plants do not replace the lush garden she had in Managua, but like the pambazos of her Tex-Mex cooking, they somehow connect her to the homeland that was taken from her. But it is that feeling that empowers her most. Forgive me for repeating: now that her loved ones are safe, she has regained her voice, which had been tied to self-censorship out of fear of retaliation for months. The lay voice of the persecuted Church now speaks freely. She received the international religious freedom award from the U.S. State Department without hiding, facing the public, with her numbers in hand, with her “PDF” turned into a key compilation for the historical memory of the crusade against freedom of worship, with determination, reconciled with her God, thanking St. Pío of Pietrelcina.
Martha Patricia concludes. After her continuous documentation work, she clearly sees the Ortega-Murillo regime’s intentions toward Catholicism. She hopes to continue denouncing religious persecution, even if her criticisms bring more retaliation and keep her condemned to exile for who knows how much longer, but always praying the novena of Pío de Pietrelcina, her saint who never abandons her.
