Lashing out at Church leaders who have protested the arrest of Bishop Rolando Álvarez, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega denounced the Catholic Church as “a perfect tyranny.”

In an angry denunciation of the Church, Ortega said that the Catholic clerics in Nicaragua are “coup plotters,” who are agents of “American imperialism.”

Ortega—whose authoritarian rule has frequently put him into conflict with the Nicaraguan hierarchy—still identifies himself as a Catholic.