There were young girls, sitting nervous and excited in new clothes under the afternoon sun. There were musicians, dancing and plates of food. There were old handmade knives and bright new razor blades.

For the 30 traditional practitioners of female genital cutting, who swayed to somnolent melodies in their matching print dresses, the event was a little like the mass cutting parties that they and their ancestors had held for centuries, in the forests of the tiny West African nation of Gambia.

These women were prominent practitioners in their communities, and cutting girls provided them with an income and respect.

But this party, in 2013 in the town of Wassu, signified the renunciation of their calling. The women carried signs that read: “I have stopped female genital mutilation,” below a drawing of a girl’s tear-stained face. One by one, they stepped forward and swore never to cut a girl again. One by one, they dropped their knives and razor blades down on a red cloth embroidered with cowrie shells.

For these women, it was the end of an ancient, socially important, and to many, horrific practice.

Or was it?

One of the 30 cutters present that day, a grandmother named Yassin Fatty, would over a decade later become the first Gambian cutter ever to be convicted of female genital mutilation.

Gambia passed a law banning the practice in 2015, but for years, the law was not enforced, and many Gambians continued to support it. When Mrs. Fatty was arrested for cutting girls and convicted last year, there was a nationwide backlash against the law.

Then Mrs. Fatty got caught between two men: a celebrity imam who wanted to make cutting legal again, and an anti-cutting activist with perhaps mixed motives.

A veteran cutter

We traveled to rural Gambia in July to meet Mrs. Fatty. We found her napping, at noon, on a mat in the shade in her family homestead in Bakadaji, the village she was born in. At 96 years old, she had earned the right to nap. For decades, she was her family’s mainstay, growing all the rice they ate and keeping her sons, their wives and their brood of children in line. But now she was tired, and her legs hurt.

We moved to a room to talk, her son and grandsons sitting around us.

“Now, my only job is to eat,” she said, her eyes twinkling. Then she turned to Mariama Souso, her adopted daughter, and inquired when her next meal would be.

Girls have always been cut in Bakadaji, a tight-knit village in Gambia’s Central Rivers Region where teens sit under trees trying to load their WhatsApp messages, men zoom off on their motorbikes to go fishing, and the muezzin calling the faithful for afternoon prayers, despite his valiant efforts, often manages to attract only a knot of old women.

And for decades, Mrs. Fatty — whose age is apparent not in her barely wrinkled skin but in her earlobes, split and scarred from long-departed earrings — was the one who cut them. Thousands of them.

“We found the practice here,” she said. “Our parents did it.”

She always cut the girls in an outdoor bathroom, she said, and immediately after, brought them to the rough-walled, unpainted room we were sitting in. We looked around. Worn fabric hung from the entrance in place of a door. The only furniture was a simple wooden bed and a bench covered in a piece of cloth, embroidered with the words “I love you.”

In Gambia, female genital cutting usually means removing the clitoris and part of the labia minora, and sometimes sealing the vagina shut except for a tiny hole. To outsiders, it seems unspeakably cruel.

But many Gambian villagers see girls who are not cut as unclean, and unreligious. These girls often become social outcasts. No man will marry them. Nobody will eat their cooking.

But Mrs. Fatty believed that the consequences of not being cut went much further than that. She asserted, against all medical evidence, that by cutting girls, she was also protecting their health. Uncut women are more likely to suffer and die in childbirth, she said, and are more likely to get sexually transmitted infections. (The opposite is true.) And then there was the sexual desire of women who still had clitorises, which many people in Bakadaji thought was a huge problem.

“If a woman is not cut, she’s always ready for sex,” Mrs. Fatty said, with a hint of a smile. “She can do it from morning to night.”

From his spot on the packed dirt floor, one of her grandsons, 24-year-old Abdoulaye Cham, piped up. Cutting girls prevented them from cheating on their husbands, he said. “A lot of young men travel and leave their wives here,” he added.

Another grandson, 23-year-old Masanneh Cham, dressed in skinny jeans, put forward a different argument, one espoused by several influential imams and their flocks, and spread on Facebook and WhatsApp.

“Whoever fights female circumcision is fighting God,” he said.

The lion man of Gambia

When Mrs. Fatty’s grandson cast opponents as godless, he had someone in mind. This was Momodou Keita. Mr. Keita was a heavyset, often affable man in his 50s with a liking for Coca-Cola, known for his decades fighting female genital cutting. He zoomed around the Central Rivers Region on his motorbike, persuading cutters like Mrs. Fatty to stop, and take part in the dropping-the-knife events held by the organization he worked for, the Gambia Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children, known as GAMCOTRAP. In a series of evening interviews at our guesthouse, he told us how he worked.

He had signed up hundreds of cutters over the years, he said, pulling posters featuring their faces, like mug shots, from a leather folder he always carried. Each woman was given money to start a business, as an alternative income source. Mrs. Fatty got cash to start a bakery, operated by her youngest son, which made the family good money, especially during the holy — and carb-heavy — month of Ramadan.

Before she attended the dropping-the-knife ceremony, Mrs. Fatty was shown a video about the consequences of cutting for women’s health. She attended a few days of an awareness-raising program on cutting organized by GAMCOTRAP, with the blessing of Bakadaji’s village chief. But beyond that, there was little attempt to change her mind.

After he recruited and educated the women, Mr. Keita had informants keeping tabs on each of them. He was proud that none of the women, according to him, had ever gone back to cutting — and took much of the credit.

“I am the lion man of The Gambia!” he said in one of our interviews, after detailing his credentials in the fight against cutting. “I am the gorilla of The Gambia!”

He and Mrs. Fatty had, in the years since her renunciation ceremony, struck up an unlikely friendship. Mr. Keita often stopped by her house. He shot the breeze with her and her sons. He drank glass after glass of attaya — sweet, frothy green tea.

“It was just casual chat, he never asked about circumcision,” Mrs. Fatty said. “I even gave him chickens, sometimes.”

But then, in late 2022, Mr. Keita said, his informants told him something was brewing in Bakadaji. Mrs. Fatty was going to cut eight girls, they said. He immediately drove to her home, he said, to warn her not to proceed.

“Proper monitoring is on you,” he remembered telling her. “You will be arrested.”

“She said, ‘Me? I will never ever do it,’” he recounted.

But on Jan. 16, 2023, an informant called again. The cutting was going ahead that morning, the informant said. Mr. Keita jumped on his motorbike.

When he arrived at Mrs. Fatty’s home, babies were screaming inside.

He had come too late. Mrs. Fatty had already cut two baby girls. He saw a woman running across the field away from the house, a third baby in her arms, but he couldn’t catch her.

He turned to Mrs. Fatty.

“I told her, for these girls, this thing will not end between us,” Mr. Keita said.

Then Mr. Keita called the police.

Cutting in secret

As the moon rose one evening, we walked through Bakadaji’s alleyways, stopping at two family homesteads full of children and young teens playing raucously, eating dinner, cuddling with their fathers, and disappearing into clouds of soapsuds as their mothers washed them before bed.

Even after the dropping-the-knife ceremony, Mrs. Fatty had secretly cut girls, she and family members told us. Over the years she had cut every girl in these two homesteads, their parents explained, except one — a 2-year-old girl named Nyara Kebbe, who played quietly in a pink bathing suit. This was the girl who Mr. Keita had seen in the arms of her fleeing mother but was unable to catch.

Mrs. Fatty had been given a bakery to lure her away from cutting, which, it was assumed, she practiced for the income. But Mrs. Fatty said that for her, cutting was a belief, and the threat of prosecution meant little to her.

“Even if you bring a bag of money, I won’t stop what I found my grandparents doing,” she said. “I don’t do anything just because I’m told to by outsiders. I listen to myself.”

And she claimed that although she’d attended the 2013 dropping-the-knife ceremony, she didn’t drop her knife or make any vow — a claim contradicted by GAMCOTRAP staff who were there.

Experts say that many practitioners are now cutting in secret, and cutting younger girls, who are less likely to remember. In 1991, Gambian girls were cut on average at age 4; now, they are usually under 2, U.N. estimates show.

Despite the millions of dollars spent by U.N. agencies and American and European donors on programs to curb cutting in Gambia over the past three decades, and even though it has been illegal to cut girls since 2015, there has been almost no change in the rate of cutting, which stands at 73 percent of girls ages 15 to 19.

Dramatic change takes decades, said Claudia Cappa, UNICEF’s lead expert on global trends in cutting. “It’s a social norm. It links to identity, it links to sexuality,” she said. “These things don’t change overnight.”

Gambia’s first convicted cutter

When the police arrived, they arrested Mrs. Fatty along with the mothers of the two babies Mr. Keita found, screaming and bleeding, in her house. The babies were treated in the hospital and slowly healed, though the permanent damage was done.

The whole family was worried about Mrs. Fatty, who was released on bail but was bewildered, and could barely manage the arduous motorcycle trips to report at the police station.

And they could not believe how, in their view, Mr. Keita had turned on them.

To the outside world, Mr. Keita looked heroic — the man who had dedicated his life to fighting cutting, who dramatically caught Mrs. Fatty in the act, and thus, according to him, saved several girls from being cut.

But Mrs. Fatty and her son Abdou Cham now say that Mr. Keita was a fraud. He never cared about cutting or protecting girls, they said, and told them to take the money from the Westerners who funded GAMCOTRAP while doing as they pleased — something Mr. Keita denied.

“Circumcision cannot be eradicated in this area,” Mr. Cham remembered Mr. Keita telling his mother. “You can do this in secret. Nobody will find out.”

The way they saw it, Mr. Keita was interested in nothing but money — and that was why he had latched onto a Western-funded organization campaigning against cutting.

At the police station, as Mrs. Fatty waited to be booked, Mr. Keita confirmed their suspicions, Mr. Cham and two male relatives said. He approached them, they said, telling them he could “kill the case” in exchange for a bribe. They complied, and gave him money then and more two weeks later — a total of 5,500 dalasi, about $80, they said. Mrs. Fatty’s adopted daughter and devoted caretaker, Ms. Souso, said she saw the money change hands.

In an interview, Mr. Keita vehemently denied soliciting or taking any bribes.

But an official familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals, confirmed the family’s account.

And Mr. Keita did not kill the case. That August, Mrs. Fatty and the two mothers stood trial. All three pleaded guilty. All three were convicted and fined 15,000 dalasi each (about $215).

The celebrity imam

The costs of the whole affair — the fines, the alleged bribes, and the gas costs of traveling to and from the police station and court — almost bankrupted Mrs. Fatty’s family members, who mostly work as subsistence farmers.

But the trial also attracted the attention of a powerful distant relative.

Abdoulie Fatty, one of Gambia’s best-known imams, was outraged when he heard what his 96-year-old cousin had been subjected to.

The right of Gambians to cut girls was a cause Imam Fatty had long and loudly espoused. He falsely claimed that female genital cutting carries no health risks. He called those trying to stop it enemies of Islam. And he accused the West of imposing its culture on Gambia.

With several Gambian lawmakers, he started campaigning in earnest for the country’s Parliament — or its Supreme Court — to decriminalize cutting, using Mrs. Fatty’s travails as a rallying cry.

The resulting national debate sometimes verged on culture war, and had some surprising effects in conservative Gambia, which is 96 percent Muslim. In urban areas, people were suddenly speaking openly — in person and online — about clitorises and women’s sexual desire.

Imam Fatty himself went on a talk show on Kerr Fatou, one of Gambia’s best-known websites, to suggest that men rub their wives’ nipples as an alternative to clitoral stimulation.

In villages like Bakadaji, and families like Mrs. Fatty’s, steeped in tradition, Imam Fatty’s message added to the impression that cutting was sanctioned by Islam — something many Muslim clerics and scholars say is not true.

The imam changed the financial fortunes of Mrs. Fatty’s family.

He visited her in Bakadaji, paid all three women’s fines, and relayed donations from some of his followers in the United Kingdom, which they used to build a cinder block wall around the back of the homestead, where Mrs. Fatty usually cut girls.

The support of such a prominent figure emboldened Mrs. Fatty. But her arrest and trial had weakened her, and though she talked a good game, her family doubted she would ever have the strength to cut again.

It would be the end of a long era. Mrs. Fatty inherited her vocation from cutting practitioners on both her mother’s and her father’s side.

Now, she said, “I’m the only one left.”

But she confided something before we left Bakadaji, as evening deepened, as men came back from fishing.

She pointed to Mariama Souso, her adopted daughter. She has chosen her as her successor.

Susan Beachy contributed research.

Nicaragua released 135 political prisoners — including 13 people affiliated with an American evangelical church — on humanitarian grounds on Thursday in a deal brokered by the U.S. government, the White House announced.

The prisoners were sent to Guatemala, where they will be processed as refugees.

The prisoner release included 11 pastors from Mountain Gateway, a Texas-based evangelical missionary church that the Nicaraguan government had accused of using its nonprofit status as a cover to purchase luxury goods, property and land.

The group also included Catholic laypeople, students and others whom President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and the first lady and vice president, Rosario Murillo, considered a threat to their authoritarian rule, Jake Sullivan, the National Security adviser, said in a statement.

“The United States again calls on the government of Nicaragua to immediately cease the arbitrary arrest and detention of its citizens for merely exercising their fundamental freedoms,” Mr. Sullivan added.

Once in Guatemala, the former prisoners will be offered the opportunity to apply for legal ways to rebuild their lives in the United States or in other countries, Mr. Sullivan said. The Biden administration expressed thanks to the president of Guatemala, Bernado Arévalo, for his government’s cooperation in the deal and for “championing democratic freedom.”

The Mountain Gateway pastors were arrested in December after completing an eight-city evangelical crusade that cost $4 million and was attended by nearly a million people. The pastors were sentenced to 12 or 15 years in prison, and fined a total of nearly $1 billion.

Two lawyers representing them were also convicted and imprisoned.

“This is the day we have been praying and believing God for,” said Jon Britton Hancock, founder and president of Mountain Gateway. “Members of Congress, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security worked tirelessly to effect their release from their unjust imprisonment.”

Mr. Hancock, who was charged but never arrested, enlisted members of Congress, particularly Representative Robert Aderholt, Republican of Alabama, to urge the ministers’ release.

Ryan Fayhee, a partner at the legal firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld who represented the pastors, said, “This seems to be part of a trend: expelling religious people and church leadership.”

Referring to Nicaragua, he added, “I’m hopeful it’ll be a safer place moving forward, where people can choose to exercise fundamental human rights, like exercising choice of religion and gathering.”

Marisela Mejía, 34, a minister and administrator of Mountain Gateway, had just given birth when she was arrested. She and her husband, Walner O. Blandón, the mission’s lead pastor, were sentenced to 15 years in prison and fined $80 million each. Their two children, both born in the United States, stayed with relatives in Nicaragua during their parents’ incarceration and were allowed to join them in Guatemala.

Ever since hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in 2018 in a quest to topple the government, Mr. Ortega has presided over a harsh crackdown on free speech and other rights. He viewed the popular uprising as an attempted coup, and penalized activists, journalists, politicians and others, accusing them of terrorism and other charges.

Initially, the crackdown was largely aimed at dissidents, but it then grew to include the closure of organizations, like Mountain Gateway, that had never spoken out against the government.

In January, the government released Bishop Rolando Álvarez, who had been detained for over a year; another Catholic bishop; two seminarians; and 15 priests. They were sent to the Vatican.

In February 2023, the United States accepted 222 political prisoners, including a former foreign minister, student leaders and presidential candidates.

It was unclear Thursday morning who else was on the list of newly freed prisoners.

Religious freedom organizations and human rights activists say that the Nicaraguan government has been using anti-money-laundering statutes to shut down civil society organizations and churches. Before Thursday’s release, a total of 36 people were detained or imprisoned in Nicaragua for religious reasons, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The group of trans women in South Jakarta were putting on their Sunday best. They wore feathers, silk, glitter and long eyelashes. Every one of them draped a rosary around their neck.

“Pope Francis deserves our best outfit,” Elvi Gondhoadjmodjo said, as the group got ready to catch a glimpse of the pope on Thursday during his visit to Indonesia.

For many trans women living on the fringes of society here, the Catholic Church is a safe haven, and Pope Francis, with his messages of tolerance and openness toward the L.G.B.T.Q. community, has become a personal hero. They were excited by his four-day visit.

“When we got Francis as the Pope, I realized that God was really listening,” said Mami Yuli, the leader of the community and a devout Catholic who has a likeness of a rosary tattooed on her chest. “This is not the Pope but God himself visiting us.”

At the shelter where many of them live, the group of 10 trans women squeezed into two rental cars and drove to the Bung Karno Stadium in Jakarta, where the pope was going to hold a Mass later on Thursday. They did not have tickets to enter but hoped they could at least get a glimpse of the pope outside.

Their excitement, and the yearslong closeness between the trans community and the Catholic Church in Jakarta, is a stark contrast with less-favorable attitudes from the Church in other countries, and with positions some church officials have expressed. But it also showed how Francis’ message of tolerance has echoed in some corners of the Catholic world thousand of miles away from the Vatican.

“Pope Francis has called for us several times not to judge them,” said the Rev. Agustinus Kelik Pribadi, the priest of the Saint Stephen Catholic Church in South Jakarta. He was referring to the pope’s famous “who am I to judge?” question about gay priests, which many felt reflected his general attitude toward the L.G.B.T.Q. community. “We must listen.”

Catholics make up a very small minority in Muslim-predominant Indonesia. Still, dozens of trans women who were not born into the Church were baptized in Jakarta in recent years. They came from nearly every corner of the country, said the Rev. Adrianus Suyadi, a Jesuit priest at Jakarta’s Cathedral.

The ties between the Church and the Jakarta trans women community are a result of the work of the city’s archbishop, Cardinal Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo, the priests said. The cardinal instructed priests to welcome transgender people into their parishes as part of a push to respect human dignity. Mami Yuli, the leader of the trans community, also lobbied the church.

The result was a rare and fond bond.

“I often went to the salon and have my hair cut with their group,” Father Pribadi said.

But overall, the transgender community still faces rejection and discrimination in Indonesia. Many are still homeless and others do sex work to survive, community members said.

Once a month, more than 50 trans women attend a prayer meeting at the Cathedral, Father Suyadi said. Many frequent cooking classes organized by the church and two have become instructors.

“When I go to the church nobody judges me,” said Ms. Gondhoadjmodjo, 40, who got baptized in 2022, and said that she has started volunteering as a teacher thanks to the Church. “That makes me more sure I want to be a Catholic.”

Mika Horulean, 26, another trans woman, attends Catholic trans-counseling meetings, in which they discuss their experiences, on Zoom every Friday. “Romo is amazing,” she said, addressing Father Suyadi with a word that means father in Javanese.

Church teachings oppose gender transition, but Francis has long urged clerics to welcome L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics into the Church. He hosted a group of transgender women at the Vatican for lunch. He approved a Vatican document that made clear that transgender people can be baptized and declared laws that criminalize being gay to be “unjust.”

But Francis has also walked a tightrope between his personal urging for more openness by the Church and upholding church doctrine.

Recently the Vatican issued a document approved by Francis stating that the church believes that transition surgery is an affront to human dignity. The pope also recently used a slur word to refer to gay people, an episode that highlighted the Church’s complicated relationship with gender and sexuality.

Even so, South Jakarta’s transgender community has focused instead on Francis’ positive messaging and openness.

“For us, L.G.B.T. people in Indonesia, there is never someone as high profile who sends a message of inclusiveness,” Mami Yuli said.

“He is much braver than the other popes before him,” she said, as she stood by her small shrine in the shelter, with a statuette of Mary and a picture of Jesus. “His message is a message of love and to pay attention to the little people.”

Some resistance remains among Catholic bishops in Indonesia. Father Suyadi said his proposal to the local bishops conference to let Mami Yuli meet the pope was rebuffed.

Bunda Mayora, 37, a trans woman in Maumere, a city in Flores, in the East of Indonesia, is also involved with the local Church. She was watching on live TV as the Pope met with Indonesian bishops on Thursday.

She was disappointed because L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics had not been invited to the Mass led by the pope.

The disappointment extended to the stadium on Thursday. A few hours after the group of trans women rallied in front of the stadium, policemen prevented them from standing at the stadium’s entrance with their banner of Francis and colorful clothes. The group headed home even before the pope arrived.

“They cannot receive us here,” said Devine Selviana Siahaan, one of the trans women who was at the stadium. “But I still can talk to Francis in my dreams.”

Muktita Suhartono and Sui-Lee Wee and Ulet Ifansasti contributed reporting from Jakarta.

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 were 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.

African flags have been flown over Tiananmen Square. Leaders of African nations have been greeted by dancers, honor guards and children waving flags. They have been escorted in extensive motorcades past banners celebrating “A Shared Future for China and Africa” and giant, elaborate flower arrangements.

China has pulled out all the stops for a gathering of leaders and top officials from more than 50 African nations this week in Beijing, welcoming them with pomp and pageantry. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has cast his country as a defender of the developing world, one that can push the West to listen to the voices of poorer nations.

“Modernization is an inalienable right of all countries,” he told the gathering on Thursday. “But the Western approach to it has inflicted immense sufferings on developing countries.”

Mr. Xi had hosted a banquet for the visiting officials at the start of the event on Wednesday, after three straight days of back-to-back bilateral talks with nearly two dozen leaders of nations ranging from impoverished Chad to the continental economic powerhouse of Nigeria.

The three-day forum is meant to demonstrate Beijing’s global clout despite rising tensions with the West. Mr. Xi’s courtship of African countries is part of a great geopolitical competition with the United States that has intensified in recent years over Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s aggressive posture toward Taiwan.

China is “trying to take advantage of the space left by the U.S. and Europe, which are increasingly disengaged with Africa,” said Eric Olander, the editor in chief of the China-Global South Project website. “China sees an opportunity to really step up its engagement, and not necessarily just with money.”

And Beijing’s diplomatic push is more urgent this year as China, faced with slowing economic growth at home and accusations of dumping excess production abroad, seeks new buyers for its goods.

“As China’s relations with the U.S. and Europe deteriorate, African markets, as well as other parts of the global south, will become even more important for Chinese goods,” said Yunnan Chen, a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute in London who has studied cooperation between China and Africa. That is particularly true of new technologies like solar panels or electric vehicles, she added.

Even so, some African leaders have indicated that they would prefer a more balanced relationship, one in which China bought more finished goods from the region, for instance. “We would like to narrow the trade deficit and address the structure of our trade,” South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, told Mr. Xi on Monday during talks held on the sidelines of the forum, according to an official transcript.

The event is also an opportunity for China to defend its engagement in Africa. It has come under criticism for offering financing without environmental, financial or human rights conditions, leading to projects tainted by corruption, pollution or labor abuses. China, one of the world’s largest creditors, has also been reluctant to offer debt relief to most countries despite the crippling load that some are carrying.

The meeting, held once every three years, has historically been a platform for China to pledge large, multibillion-dollar packages of financial and technical aid to Africa. President William Ruto of Kenya, for instance, hopes to get funding to finish a railway line from the Rift Valley to Malaba town on Kenya’s western border with Uganda. He is also looking for more investment to build roads and dams and set up an industrial park for pharmaceutical companies.

China has adjusted its approach to new aid for the region. Instead of large railway and other infrastructure projects, Beijing is now emphasizing less costly commitments, like digital skills training — a useful contribution on a continent with a youthful population — and what it calls “small and beautiful” projects. On Thursday, Mr. Xi said China would train 60,000 people, collaborate with African media and militaries and work with Africa on the “peaceful use of nuclear technology.”

“We are in a period of recalibration, where African governments and Chinese banks are both more sensitive to risks,” said Deborah Brautigam, director of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Chinese lenders last year committed $4.61 billion to African countries and banks, the highest amount since 2016, according to data from Boston University. But that is still a fraction of the nearly $30 billion a year that they pledged in 2016, at the peak of Chinese financing in Africa.

The shift is driven in part by changes inside China, where the property sector is in crisis and local governments are overextended, and by higher interest rates post-pandemic, which raise the cost of debt for African countries. Angola and Zambia now owe billions of dollars to Chinese state-owned banks.

“The world’s financial situation does not allow large-scale loans to developing countries,” said Tang Xiaoyang, an international relations scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, referring to the higher interest rates. “The cost is too high.”

Critics have said that past meetings led to bloated loans that African countries could not pay back. (African countries also owe significant amounts to the World Bank and other international lenders.)

And while Chinese lenders financed crucial infrastructure on the continent, they also backed coal-fired power plants and other projects that contributed to greenhouse gas emissions.

In the run-up to the summit, Chinese state media outlets have highlighted projects backed by Chinese lenders in African villages, like solar panel installations and soybean-planting techniques, as bringing direct benefits to communities.

The emphasis on smaller, greener initiatives may help assuage concerns in Africa about unprofitable megaprojects, said Jana De Kluiver, a research officer at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. “It has this aspect of making sure that the China-Africa relationship, at least on a global scale, doesn’t look predatory,” she said.

Even as the scale of Beijing’s cooperation with Africa has shifted or declined, “the fact that China has maintained these triannual summits over two decades is a huge political achievement,” said Ms. Chen, of the Overseas Development Institute.

Such meetings are a way for Beijing to demonstrate China’s commitment to Africa. The United States, by contrast, held one such summit with African leaders in 2022, after eight years.

Ms. Brautigam said that the summit follows months of behind-the-scenes diplomacy between Chinese and African officials. “You can contrast this with how we do things in the U.S., where engagement is far more ad hoc,” she said.

China has officially asserted that it does not see Africa as a region where major powers compete for geopolitical gains, insisting it is interested in working with the region toward so-called “win-win cooperation.” At the same time, China’s aid, investments and diplomacy have helped secure African backing for China at international organizations like the United Nations.

China has also won support on the African continent for the position it has taken on Israel’s war in Gaza. Beijing has brought rival Palestinian factions together for talks as it has sought a bigger diplomatic role in the Middle East. It has asserted its longstanding support of Palestinian statehood and criticized Israel’s bombardment of the region.

That position aligns China with countries like South Africa, which has called Israel’s policies toward Palestinians an “extreme form of apartheid.” A joint China-South Africa statement released on Monday cited the two countries’ shared interest in an “immediate cease-fire and end to all fighting” in Gaza.

“China’s full embrace of the Palestinian cause has fully aligned it with almost the entire global south,” said Mr. Olander. For many Africans, he added, the war “closely resembles the colonial wars that ravaged their countries.”

Abdi Latif Dahir contributed reporting from Nairobi, Kenya.