The action was announced in the government's Official Gazette, which cited the diocese for failing to file financial reports with the Ministry of the Interior in 2019-23 and for failing to register the members of its board of directors after March 2023. Similar charges were lodged against the other dissolved organizations, which included the Evangelical Alliance, Christian Reformed Church, and Moravian Church.

The Rt. Rev. Harold Dixon, who has served as Bishop of Nicaragua since 2019, told TLC on September 7, "With God's help we are okay. Thanks to the Almighty, the churches are working normal. They don't take anything from us. We will begin from zero. The good Lord is always with us."

"Pray for us, that is the key," he added.

Ramón Ovalle, provincial secretary for the Anglican Church in Central America, of which the Diocese of Nicaragua is a member, told TLC that the church's primate, Archbishop Juan David Alvorado and the former primate, Bishop Julio Murray of Panama, plan to visit Nicaragua next week to meet with the church's leaders so they can understand the situation more fully.

The Anglican Consultative Council issued a statement of support for the Diocese of Nicaragua at their 2023 meeting in Accra, urging Anglicans across the world "to join in prayer for our brothers and sisters in Nicaragua, that they may live in peace and justice with respect for their dignity, and guarantees for their human rights." They also commended the bishops of the province "in their pastoral and prophetic efforts to raise a voice as a sign of hope for the people of Nicaragua."

A March report by Nicaraguan journalist Francisco Bautista says that there are about 9,000 Anglicans in the nation of 6.9 million, and that they gather in 16 church buildings and several mission congregations. Its oldest church, St. Mark's Cathedral in Bluefields, the capital of Nicaragua's South Caribbean Autonomous Region, has an active Facebook page, and hosted a gathering of the diocese's Anglican Church Women in June.

Anglican mission along Nicaragua's Caribbean coast, the "Mosquito Coast," dates back to 1742, shortly after the region became a British protectorate, named for the Miskitos, a mixed Indigenous-African people, who were the dominant power in the region. The British transferred authority over the region to Nicaragua in 1860.

The Church of England transferred the Nicaraguan churches into the care of the Episcopal Church in the 19th century. Nicaragua became a missionary district in 1967, and was made a diocese in 1980. In 1998, the Dioceses of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Panama were granted autonomy, and combined with the Diocese of Costa Rica to create a united province, the Anglican Church in Central America.

Most Nicaraguan Anglicans still live in the Mosquito Coast region, where English Creole is the predominant language and cultural ties to the Caribbean are stronger than to the Spanish-speaking interior. The Moravian Church, which was also dissolved by the government on August 29, is the dominant cultural force in the region, with congregations in nearly every community.

President Ortega, leader of the Sandanista National Liberation Front, first led Nicaragua from 1979-1990. He was democratically elected as president in 2006, but during his second term, he seized full control of all branches of government, the police, and the military, and, in the words of a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, "aggressively dismantled all institutional checks on presidential power." He is labeled as a dictator by many journalists and foreign governors.

Since 2018, when protests against cuts in social security brought hundreds of thousands to the streets, the Ortega government has grown increasingly brutal and repressive. Hundreds were killed in crackdowns, and many activists and social leaders were expelled from the country.

Since then, the government has taken numerous measures to bring all non-governmental organizations under its strict control. These include the passage of Law 977 by the Ortega-controlled National Assembly in 2019. Ostensibly intended to combat money laundering and domestic terrorism, it requires onerous registration and financial reporting for all nonprofits. An additional measure passed in 2022, Law 1115, imposes further registration and reporting duties and imposes harsh penalties, including dissolution, on organizations that fail to comply. The August 29 dissolutions were triggered by failures to fully comply with these laws.

"Nicaragua's government uses laws related to cybercrimes, financial crimes, legal registration for not-for-profit organizations, and sovereignty and self-determination to harshly punish religious leaders and laypeople and arbitrarily shutter religious organization," concluded the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) said in a June report.

Before the most recent dissolutions, Ortega had mostly used state power against the Roman Catholic Church, whose leaders had been more willing to speak out against his abuses, while leaving Protestant churches alone. According to a 2020 survey, 44.9 percent of Nicaraguans are Catholic and 37.6 percent are Protestant.

Activist Martha Patricia Molina, who fled the country in 2021, claims in a report released last week that 250 Catholic clerics and religious have been forced out of the country, including three bishops and 136 priests who were expelled by the state. The government expelled the Jesuit order entirely, taking over its Central American University in Managua last year, claiming it was "a center of terrorism."

The USCIRF report notes that Ortega government officials have used language demonizing the Catholic Church, describing it as a "mafia" and calling priests "representatives of the devil." Public processions were banned during Lent and Holy Week last spring, and government plainclothes and uniformed agents have increasingly entered Catholic churches and schools to "conspicuously monitor" services and activities, in an attempt to intimidate clergy and congregants.

In 2023, similar kinds of monitoring, as well as threats and acts of vandalism, began to be used by the government against the influential Moravian Church. Last December, 11 pastors of Mountain Gateway Ministry, an evangelical church founded by a Texas missionary, were falsely charged with money laundering, and each was sentenced to 11 to 15 years imprisonment and fined $80 million. In June, the government closed and seized the property of the evangelical Martin Luther King University in Matagalpa, claiming that it had offered courses not authorized by the country's rector of higher education.

"One of the government's biggest fears is that through religious leaders, the people of Nicaragua can have change," Felix Navarrete, an exiled Nicaraguan activist, told The New York Times. "They are trying to avoid that at all costs."