They Ask For Justice In The Case Of A Woman Burned At The Stake

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Religious and a body defending women's rights in Nicagua ask for justice after the authorities of that country detained a pastor Juan Gregorio Rocha Romero and four of his followers for hitting a woman, Vilma Trujillo García because she would be "demonized".

The 25-year-old woman died Tuesday at the Lenín Fonseca hospital in Managua, where she had been in a coma since she was taken to the intensive care unit of that medical center on February 23. Rocha Romero and her followers face, among other charges, attempted murder.

According to the newspaper La Prensa from that country, Rocha Romero and his followers belong to the Celestial Vision Church of the Assemblies of God, in the El Cortezal community in the Autonomous Region of the Nicaraguan North Caribbean Coast. These would have thrown the woman into a bonfire, alive and naked, because they wanted to exorcise the demon that would be inside.

Before being transferred to the capital by the authorities, Rocha Romero, 23, assured the press that they did not throw the woman into the flames, but that she had decided to burn herself because "she was demonized." "It is that God said that he was going to take that bad spirit out of her and put a little fire there," declared Rocha Romero, "because there the spirit was going to be expelled."

Trujillo García was abandoned for about nine hours, until someone from the community informed her 15-year-old sister what had happened. This was the first to come to her aid and found her moored and burned near a ravine on the bank of a river.

When she was transferred to the hospital in the Nicaraguan capital, Trujillo García had 80 percent of her body burned and, according to her husband Reynaldo Peralta Rodríguez, the doctors indicated that she had "a cooked kidney and liver" and therefore was not going to survive.

For Peralta Rodríguez, the crime of which his wife was a victim has no forgiveness from God. "My wife spent eight days locked up in that congregation," he says, "and says Vilma's sister, who was there, that they burned together some tucos of firewood and tied her up near the fire and then pushed her naked."

The parish priest of the community's Catholic Church, Emilio Rivas, said that when "many of us get into fanaticism and see the devil in everything, it is not correct", and that in the case of Trujillo it should have been discerned if the young woman had a psychological illness to provide you with the medical help you needed.

For his part, Pastor Augusto Marenco - who belonged to the Assemblies of God and today is pastor general of the Apostolic Ministry - indicated that this act was "a deviation" by the pastor and those who would have participated in it and asked the authorities to Investigate that crime.