María Teresa Hernández

Among many faith leaders nationwide, the pain unleashed on June 20, 2022 — when the Revs. Javier Campos Morales, 79, and Joaquín César Mora Salazar, 80, were murdered by a local gang leader — has not faded. Nor their quest for peace.

With no vehicles at hand, Maribel Estrada runs to pick up her children from school, to attend Mass and to visit her mother, who lives 160 miles away.

Since he took power in 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has avoided direct confrontation with cartels and violent gangs controlling and terrorizing local communities. His " hugs, not bullets " policy has drawn extensive criticism from faith leaders, human rights organizations and journalists who have echoed victims' fears and anger.

By mid-2024, Claudia Sheinbaum will most likely become Mexico's first female president. She would also be its first leader with a Jewish background in a country that's home to nearly 100 million Catholics.

Long before it was confiscated by President Daniel Ortega's government in mid-August, the Jesuit-run University of Central America in Nicaragua was a special place for the thousands whose minds and lives it transformed.

"I respect the (Catholic) religion because we grew up in this place, but the mountain speaks to us in the words of our grandparents, not in the words of the conquerors," said Moisés Vega, a 64-year-old "granicero" who says he can speak the sacred language of volcanoes to ask for good weather and a good crop.
 

It is one of the world's most visited and beloved religious venues – the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, with a circular, tent-shaped roof visible from miles away and a sacred history that each year draws millions of pilgrims from near and far to its hilltop site in Mexico City.

Under a white tent on the street outside Our Lady of the Angels on a recent Sunday, Fr. Adrián Vázquez led parishioners seated in pews and plastic chairs in celebrating 10 a.m. Mass, flanked by piles of rubble from the sanctuary left there by a deadly earthquake nearly five years ago.

Here's a look at the fraught relationship between the church and the Nicaraguan government amid a political standoff that's now in its fifth year, with no end in sight.