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An American Church Thrived in Nicaragua. Then Its Pastors Went to Prison.
Evangelical pastors led by a Texas missionary in Nicaragua were accused of money laundering, in a widespread crackdown on religious groups.
Reporting from Florida
As Nicaragua has come under the tightening grip of its authoritarian government, religious leaders have been among the biggest targets, harassed, arrested and forced into exile.
Yet American missionaries from the Mountain Gateway church had managed to escape the crackdown.
The Hancock family, evangelical Christians from Texas who founded the church, prayed with Nicaraguan police officials and members of Congress and attracted fawning articles in the government media.
With thousands of followers and millions of dollars in donations, Mountain Gateway grew in size, finances and influence in Nicaragua, where it drew nearly one million people to a series of evangelical revivals that packed town squares and stadiums around the country.
It was all possible because the church enjoyed the government’s blessing.
Until it didn’t.
“The Lord touched my heart for Nicaragua,” said Jon Britton Hancock, 59, the founder of Mountain Gateway.
Then, he said, people who responded to his leadership went to prison.
Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is the vice president, have waged a sweeping campaign against nonprofits and religious groups. More than 1,600 organizations, many of them evangelical churches, have been closed in the past month alone.
Mountain Gateway became a target of that campaign.
Late last year, just four weeks after Mountain Gateway held a series of enormous evangelical events, 11 pastors the Hancocks had recruited were jailed on money laundering and fraud charges. Their families had not seen or heard from them since their arrests in December.
In March, the pastors were sentenced to terms of 12 or 15 years in prison and fined $80 million each.
Even the two lawyers who represented them were imprisoned. More than $5 million worth of church property was seized.
The pastors were finally freed Thursday as part of a prisoner release negotiated by the U.S. State Department that included more than 100 other political prisoners. All those released went by plane to Guatemala City.
The targeting of religious and other groups that once had a warm relationship with the government signals the Ortega administration’s efforts to close off any civic space not completely under its control, experts say.
Mr. Hancock; his wife, Audrey; their son-in-law; and their daughter-in-law have also been publicly accused of money laundering by Nicaragua’s government but were out of the country during the sweep.
They spent the year in Washington lobbying members of Congress, the State Department, other agencies and religious groups on the jailed pastors’ behalf.
“There’s no doubt that what we see occurring under Ortega and Murillo is beyond a slide to authoritarianism,” said Stephen Schneck, chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which monitors such cases around the world. “It’s full-blown authoritarianism and perhaps sliding to totalitarianism.”
In addition to the recently released pastors, 25 other people were being detained or imprisoned for religious reasons in Nicaragua, the commission said.
The case against Mountain Gateway is especially noteworthy because Protestant churches in Nicaragua had typically stayed out of political affairs, even as Catholic priests and bishops grew increasingly active on social justice issues.
Several Catholic priests were among the revolutionaries who took office when the leftist Sandinistas took power in the 1980s. Dozens of others have been jailed in recent years as Catholic clergy spoke out against Mr. Ortega and his wife.
The Roman Catholic Church played a key role in sheltering protesters and denouncing human rights abuses after a 2018 uprising that sought to topple Mr. Ortega’s government. The president viewed the movement as an attempted coup and jailed hundreds of people, including clerics.
More than two dozen Catholic priests have been expelled from Nicaragua in the past year.
But as a prominent Catholic bishop was being sentenced to 26 years in prison, the government — eager to show that religious freedom still thrived in Nicaragua — gave the green light last year for Mountain Gateway to launch “Good News Nicaragua,” a 15-night revival crusade.
“We were pretty astonished that we obtained permission in the middle of the crackdown on the Catholics,” Mr. Hancock said.
The Hancocks, longtime missionaries who raised their children in Mexico, traveled in 2012 to Nicaragua, where they established churches in 15 rural and remote communities.
As the government targeted other religious leaders, the Hancocks said, they chose to keep quiet and “not take sides,” because doing so would surely get them kicked out.
They bought a coffee farm and prided themselves on paying pickers 48 percent more than the minimum wage. They sold bags of coffee outside their headquarters in Dripping Springs, Texas, about half an hour west of Austin.
As the operation grew, Mountain Gateway bought a $600,000 house in the capital, Managua, for traveling missionaries. They soon owned 47 vehicles.
For a two-night evangelical event in Managua, the organization spent $800,000 — an enormous sum in the hemisphere’s second-poorest country — and hired 3,000 buses to ferry passengers there. The gathering was attended by an estimated 325,000 people.
“Our base got motivated,” Mr. Hancock said. “Our donor base exploded.”
After holding 15 events in eight cities that cost a total of $4 million to stage, plans were underway for at least a dozen more.
Marisela Mejía, 34, and her husband, Walner O. Blandón, were pastors who ran Mountain Gateway’s operations. “My sister was delighted working with the Americans, helping the coffee producers, doing Christian social work,” said her brother, Carlos Javier Mejía.
Then, without warning, Ms. Mejía, her husband and nine other ministers were arrested and accused of using the church as a “front” to purchase luxury items. The government said in a news release that the church was moving large amounts of money of unknown origin.
Mountain Gateway “recruited peasants,” seeking to make people believe that they were “helping the Nicaraguan people and spreading the word of God,” the national police said. Instead, the police claimed, the pastors had “dedicated themselves to acquiring vehicles, farms, houses in residential areas and doing business.”
Mr. Hancock said the government had closely monitored the church’s activities all along, conducting monthly audits, approving purchases and large cash transfers.
The prosecutor’s office did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Ms. Murillo, who also serves as a government spokeswoman.
“The government was extremely wary of nongovernment organizations having anything that generated funds,” said Mr. Hancock’s son, Jacob, who was also accused. “So we created a for-profit entity that had all of the profit going directly toward the mission. We were going to build a school. We had a lot of dreams.”
Human rights activists and religious freedom organizations say the government uses money-laundering statutes as a weapon to shut down organizations it does not control.
Still, Pentecostal organizations allied with the government released statements saying they enjoyed religious freedom, and Sandinista Party supporters said the government was taking aim at nonprofit groups that failed to keep accurate records.
“Religious persecution is only and exclusively when, for reasons of faith, I am impeded from expressing myself,” said Francisco Javier Bautista Lara, a former ambassador to the Vatican for the Sandinista government.
“It has to be for the reason of faith: because I believe in Jesus Christ or because I believe in Mohammed, or because I believe in Buddha, or because I believe in the Virgin Mary,” he added. “There is no religious persecution here at all. What exists here is a state that regulates and establishes norms and rules.”
That argument rings hollow for the many people who have lost property, citizenship or their civic organizations without due process or any way to appeal.
“That money-laundering story just doesn’t jibe,” said Gonzalo Carrión, a human rights lawyer who fled Nicaragua for Costa Rica six years ago, was tried in absentia, had his citizenship revoked and his home seized.
“What they want to do is to shut everything down and only allow the people and groups who come to the presidential couple on their knees, with their head bowed,” Mr. Carrión said.
Mr. Carrión and other people following the Mountain Gateway case believe the president and his wife, who is known for controlling every aspect of government, most likely grew nervous when they saw the masses of people drawn to the prayer events.
Ms. Murillo is leery of anything that could mushroom into a social movement, experts said.
“The government is very jealous of sharing any kind of leadership,” said Kristina Hjelkrem, a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom International, a conservative religious advocacy organization, which gave Mountain Gateway legal assistance. “These were sham charges, a sham trial and a sham conviction.”
Alfonso Flores Bermúdez contributed reporting.
Frances Robles is a Times reporter covering Latin America and the Caribbean. She has reported on the region for more than 25 years. More about Frances Robles
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