Dianna Ortiz – 1989 torture victim of US-backed Guatemalan military regime – has died after a short illness
Rights Action honors and remembers Dianna Ortiz, a shining light of a person, survivor of being disappeared and brutally tortured by the US-backed Guatemalan military regime in 1989.
We honor and remember Dianna, a courageous advocate for the rights and needs of torture survivors, a courageous advocate working to the hold the US government accountable for its direct role in the atrocities and mass killings in Guatemala.
“On Nov. 2, 1989, assailants Sister Ortiz identified as Guatemalan security forces abducted her from a convent retreat-house garden in Antigua and drove her to a detention center in Guatemala City. Targeted for working with the Indigenous community — which the military had long brutalized for presumed left-wing sympathies — she said she was blindfolded and raped by three captors.
“They burned her with cigarettes as they demanded names of Indigenous subversives, she said; a doctor who later examined her counted 111 burn marks. She was lowered into a pit with rats and decomposing bodies and later forced to dismember another captive with a machete. She was told the killing was photographed and videotaped, to be used as blackmail if Sister Ortiz attempted to seek redress, she said.
“About a day into her imprisonment, a fourth man, called Alejandro but whose accented Spanish led her to believe that he was American, entered the torture chambers and ordered the others to stop. He said Sister Ortiz’s disappearance was making headlines in the local and American media. She said Alejandro apologized to her for what he claimed was a case of mistaken identity. During a ride to what he said was a safe haven — and what she assumed would be the place of her execution — the man advised her strongly to forget what had happened. She jumped out at a traffic stop and hid inside a store before calling members of her religious community to rescue her.”
(Washington Post, full article below)
I first learned of and met Dianna in the early 1990s when living in Guatemala, working with EPICA (Ecumenical Program on Central America). When we moved to Washington DC in 1995, and I began work with Rights Action (then Guatemala Partners), my work over-lapped with Dianna, and her network of friends and colleagues in the GHRC (Guatemala Human Rights Commission), TASSC (Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International), Assisi Community, the Dorothy Day catholic center.
We send our heartful sympathies and respect to Dianna’s family and loved ones, her dear friends and colleagues in the Assissi community, at TASSC, GHRC and Pax Christi.
We thank Dianna for her extraordinary courage, dignity and humanity.
Grahame Russell, Rights Action
A shining light
Dianna Ortiz presente!
Dianna Ortiz, nun who told of brutal abduction by Guatemalan military, dies
By Ryan Di Corpo, Washington Post, Feb. 19, 2021
Dianna Ortiz, a slight Catholic nun from New Mexico, arrived in Guatemala in 1987 against a backdrop of devastating violence: a decades-long civil war, pitting [the U.S.-backed military and economic elites against the Guatemalan people and the small URNG armed rebel group, that would claim well over 250,000 lives and violently displace millions].
But as a member of the Ursuline teaching order who came to the country’s western highlands to help Mayan grade-school children learn to read and write and understand the Bible, she said she felt relatively insulated from the killings and disappearances.
Over the next two years, she disregarded menacing letters and the male stranger on the street who knew her name and tried to intimidate her into leaving the country. “I didn’t think that the threats were something that I should have taken seriously, because I was a U.S. citizen, and I assumed that my citizenship would protect me,” she later told NPR. “But what I learned — that was not the case.”
The Guatemalan military’s subsequent abduction, gang rape and torture of Sister Ortiz — who died Feb. 19 at 62 in Washington of cancer — became a global news story when she claimed an American [“Alejandro”] with ties to the U.S. Embassy had been complicit in her ordeal.
She was forced to defend her credibility, as a U.S. Embassy official at one point described her account as a “hoax” designed to derail an aid package to the government. The State Department eventually acknowledged that there was “no reason not to believe” her.
Settling in Washington, Sister Ortiz became a prominent advocate of survivors of state-sanctioned violence and helped campaign to expose classified U.S. documents showing American links to human-rights abuses in Guatemala. As a plaintiff in a lawsuit against a Guatemalan defense minister, she shared in a $47.5 million judgment in a U.S. court that concluded she had been a victim of his “indiscriminate campaign of terror” against thousands of civilians.
Despite her small frame — at 5-foot-3, she weighed less than 100 pounds — Sister Ortiz exuded what Kerry Kennedy, president of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group, called “a combination of absolute, angelic innocence and this indescribable inner strength to stand up again and again every time she was brutalized.”
On Nov. 2, 1989, assailants Sister Ortiz identified as Guatemalan security forces abducted her from a convent retreat-house garden in Antigua and drove her to a detention center in Guatemala City.
Targeted for working with the Indigenous community — which the military had long brutalized for presumed left-wing sympathies — she said she was blindfolded and raped by three captors.
They burned her with cigarettes as they demanded names of Indigenous subversives, she said; a doctor who later examined her counted 111 burn marks. She was lowered into a pit with rats and decomposing bodies and later forced to dismember another captive with a machete. She was told the killing was photographed and videotaped, to be used as blackmail if Sister Ortiz attempted to seek redress, she said.
About a day into her imprisonment, a fourth man, called Alejandro but whose accented Spanish led her to believe that he was American, entered the torture chambers and ordered the others to stop. He said Sister Ortiz’s disappearance was making headlines in the local and American media.
She said Alejandro apologized to her for what he claimed was a case of mistaken identity. During a ride to what he said was a safe haven — and what she assumed would be the place of her execution — the man advised her strongly to forget what had happened. She jumped out at a traffic stop and hid inside a store before calling members of her religious community to rescue her.
After returning to the United States two days later, Sister Ortiz experienced vast gaps in memory of her pre-Guatemala life; she recoiled from family and friends in the Ursuline community, many of whom she no longer recognized. She spent several years rebuilding her life, including intensive counseling. She said she had become pregnant through the rapes and had an abortion.
“I felt I had no choice,” she later told the Kennedy human rights organization. “If I had had to grow within me what the torturers left me I would have died.”
In the early 1990s, she filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain files from U.S. government agencies in the hope of identifying the suspected CIA operative. The Justice Department opened and then closed an investigation citing a lack of evidence. (She told The Washington Post she had stopped cooperating because of questions that made her feel revictimized.)
She began recounting her story in media interviews and on Palm Sunday 1996 began a weeks-long hunger-strike and vigil in Lafayette Square outside the White House. “I want to know why I was targeted,” she told the Washington Times, “and why a U.S. citizen had the authority to give orders to my torturers, and why he had access to a clandestine prison.”
Sister Ortiz was credited with other activists in helping to build political pressure that resulted in the release of classified documents about American involvement in Guatemala and the murders, kidnappings and torture committed in some instances by paid CIA informants.
“It was the first time the U.S. government was willing to openly question the way it had used killers in Guatemala to obtain intelligence,” said Kate Doyle, a senior analyst at the anti-secrecy group National Security Archive. (The 36-year conflict officially ended with a United Nations-backed peace accord in 1996, and the head of a subsequent U.N. truth commission report confirmed CIA and other “constituent structures” of the American government lent direct and indirect support to illegal state operations.”)
In her own case, however, Sister Ortiz said she continued to be “disappointed.” State Department files she obtained were heavily censored. A reference to “Alejandro,” Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory reported, “was followed by three pages of redacted material.”
The documents revealed that powerful figures within the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala had expressed doubts about the veracity of her account.
Thomas F. Stroock, a Wyoming businessman and political appointee serving as ambassador to Guatemala, told The Post he was among those at the embassy at the time who questioned the “motives and timing” of her claims — noting they arose just before a U.S. congressional debate about financial aid to the country, then in the grip of economic crisis.
“For a person who apparently knew little Spanish and did not know the capital well, had not slept for 24 hours, had suffered an intensive torture session including 50 to 70 cigarette burns, and in deep shock rendering her incapable of talking, Sister Dianna seemed to have little difficulty escaping by jumping out of a moving car, running at high speed, asking Guatemalans for protection . . . and then placing telephone calls to a retreat in Antigua she had only visited once,” Stroock wrote in a 1989 cable, according to the Washington Times.
Other notes from Embassy personnel suggested Sister Ortiz was a left-wing propagandist orchestrating a “hoax.” As part of what she called a smear campaign, Guatemalan military officials circulated a false rumor that she had invented the abuse story as cover for a sadomasochistic lesbian affair. Meanwhile, an investigation by the Organization of American States had found Sister Ortiz’s account credible.
Backed by a public-interest law organization, Sister Ortiz and eight Guatemalans filed suit in 1991 against former Guatemalan defense minister Héctor Gramajo under a federal law that allows Americans and foreign U.S. residents to sue any individual, while the accused is living in the United States, for human rights violations committed anywhere. (Gramajo was then in Massachusetts pursuing a degree in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.)
In 1995, a federal judge in Boston ordered Gramajo to pay $47.5 million to the plaintiffs, noting that Gramajo “was aware of and supported widespread acts of brutality committed under his command resulting in thousands of civilian deaths.”
Sister Ortiz’s share was $5 million but neither she nor the others collected from Gramajo, who denied the accusations and had returned to Guatemala without mounting a defense. In 2004, Gramajo died after being swarmed by killer bees on his avocado ranch, according to news reports.
As an outgrowth of Sister Ortiz’s work for the nonprofit Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA, she started a project in 1998 that became the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International. Her Washington-based group, where she spent a decade as executive director, sought to unite and amplify the voices of torture victims and help them repair their lives.
“The reason that work is so difficult is because torture is deliberate, meant to control individuals and to break them,” said Meredith Larson, a human-rights advocate who survived political violence in Guatemala while working as a human rights observer. “For a lot of people who experience torture, you feel so broken afterwards, you feel so guilty. You are left as a shell of yourself. Like with Dianna, the process of trying to get the truth can be retraumatizing when you are not believed.”
Dianna Mae Ortiz was born in Colorado Springs on Sept. 2, 1958, and grew up in Grants, N.M., one of eight children. Her father was a uranium miner, and her mother was a homemaker. In 1977, she entered the Ursuline novitiate at Mount Saint Joseph in Maple Mount, Ky. She moved to Guatemala after teaching kindergarten in Kentucky.
With human rights advocate Patricia Davis, she wrote a memoir, “The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey From Torture to Truth” (2002). Survivors include her mother, Amby Ortiz of Grants; four brothers; and two sisters.
Last year, Sister Ortiz was named deputy executive director of Pax Christi USA, the American branch of the international Catholic peace movement. She lived in Washington at the Assisi Community, a Catholic community of lay and religious men and women. Her death, at a hospice center, was confirmed by her friend Marie Dennis, a Pax Christi colleague.
At times, Sister Ortiz said she continued to struggle with the Christian ideal of forgiveness. “I leave that in God’s hands,” she told NPR. “The fact that I’m a Catholic nun and I’m not able to forgive, that makes me feel all the more guilty. I’m not sure what it means to forgive.”
Jennifer Harbury
Dear Friends, we lost our beloved Sister Dianna Ortiz this morning. She was completely at peace, did not suffer, and she died surrounded by her mother, sisters, and close friends. As she said, it was simply time for her to go home. We are happy that she may rest at last, but we are devastated by her sudden absence from our own lives.
Few people have ever been so universally loved, let alone have earned such love and returned it tenfold. Her achievements were remarkable, and too numerous to set forth here. My favorite memory of her though will always be of her sitting quietly in a corner with yet another despairing survivor of trauma and torture, setting aside her own pain and simply radiating love, comfort and healing. She was luminous.
As they say in the Middle East, "Only God Can Live Forever". We had no to right to keep her, but will cherish every moment she shared with us.
Presente.
Dianna Ortiz presente!
Guatemalan Human Rights Commission statement
With heavy hearts, yet mindful that her work continues in the world, we mark the passing today of Sister Dianna Ortiz, OSU. Dianna worked at the GHRC (Guatemala Human Rights Commission) from 1994 to 2002.
A survivor of torture in Guatemala, Dianna bravely pursued her case through the Guatemalan court system in the early 90s, to no avail, and bravely continued fighting for the rights of survivors of torture, founding the Torture Abolition and Survivor’s Support Coalition in 1998, as a project of GHRC. TASSC operated as a project of GHRC until it received its own 501(c)(3) status in 2002.
In 1996 Dianna conducted a highly publicized vigil and hunger strike in front of the White House to request the declassification of all US government documents related to cases of human rights abuse in Guatemala since 1954. The State Department made a voluntary release of thousands of pages of documents that illustrated US complicity with the Guatemalan government in its brutal and genocidal campaign against the Mayan indigenous and against armed insurgents, human rights defenders, and others working for change.
Dianna first came to Washington to participate in GHRC’s 1992 conference against torture in Guatemala, giving the keynote speech. GHRC’s founding director, Sister Alice Zachmann, had fought for Dianna’s release when she was abducted in Guatemala in 1989 and was instrumental in connecting her with a torture treatment center in Chicago, the Marjorie Kovler Center.
A couple of years later Dianna would join GHRC’s staff of three and play a pivotal role in supporting Jennifer Harbury’s efforts to learn the fate of her husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, efforts that resulted in the disclosure of continued and close US collaboration with and funding of Guatemala’s military death squads.
Dianna was an example of strength, generosity of spirit, and courage. All who knew her were touched by her and all she touched was improved. We are blessed to have had her with us at GHRC and we know she will remain with us in spirit and with all who fight for human rights.
Pax Christi Statement on the passing of our beloved Dianna Ortiz, OSU
Earlier this morning, Dianna Ortiz, OSU, our friend and colleague, passed away after a short illness. As anyone who ever encountered Dianna knows, she was an extraordinary person. We have lost a member of our family, the heart at the center of our life together as a staff who lifted all of us with her unceasing encouragement, support, kindness and gentleness. Our heartbreak and grief are only tempered by our gratitude and love for all Dianna has been for us, and for the rest and peace that she now has. The entire Pax Christi USA community mourns with all those who know and love Di, and we give thanks for the time that she was among us.
Many of us in the Pax Christi world first met or learned of Dianna in the 1990s when, with grace and perseverance, she pushed the U.S. government to tell the truth about the kidnapping and torture she suffered in Guatemala in November 1989.
Dianna drew on her own excruciating experience to create the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC), which provides tools and assistance for torture survivors to advocate for themselves, to raise awareness of the ongoing use of torture around the world and to change laws and customs. She served as TASSC’s executive director for several years.
Dianna was a part of the Pax Christi family for many years. She received the Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace award in 2000, and then served as program director and internship program coordinator from 2009-2012. She returned to the staff as deputy director almost one year ago.
More information will be shared in coming days. For now, we ask for prayers for the Pax Christi family, for Dianna’s Ursuline community in Kentucky, for the Assisi community in Washington, D.C. where Dianna has lived since the 1990s, and for her mother, siblings, nieces and nephews.
Dianna Ortiz, presente!
Falling into the arms of a loving God:
Remembering the last days of Dianna Ortiz, OSU
by Joseph Nangle, OFM, Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace
To write about the final days of Sister Dianna Ortiz’s life is beyond sad. For those who have not heard, Dianna passed away early this morning after a short illness; my apologies for conveying word of it in such an impersonal way.
Actually, her illness and devastating diagnosis of an inoperable cancer has taken place almost too quickly to comprehend at this moment. Three weeks ago a member of our Assisi Community – of which Dianna has been a part for 25 years – insisted that she go to an emergency room for persistent and increasingly painful stomach pain. In rapid succession, Dianna was hospitalized, discovered to have a serious abdominal blockage and biopsied, revealing the cancer. She was designated for chemotherapy to reduce the tumor but when her symptoms continued to increase, she underwent surgery and the inoperable status of the cancer was discovered. All in less than three weeks!
It is said that our parents’ final legacy is their acceptance of death. Surely this can be said of anyone close to us who walks bravely through the dying process.
It is most certainly true in the case of our dear sister – friend – community member – and exemplar. After the initial shock of this rapid series of events, Dianna seemed to call on a deep well of faith, acceptance and resignation as she faced the inevitability of her situation.
No doubt all of us who have known Dianna from the time of her horrendous experience in Guatemala were not only shocked but near desperation thinking of this still-young loved one having to suffer in another terrible way. Once again, our question is: Why, Why O God!
But as the last few days of relative comfort unfolded and we were able to visit Dianna in the hospital, all of us came away awed by her serene state of mind, especially her concern for loved ones – her elderly mother and extended family in New Mexico, dear friends in her Ursuline religious community, and the wide, wide circle of those who had walked with her on her amazing journey. She made good-bye phone calls to as many as possible of those special people as her strength permitted during those few precious hours before she was no longer able to do so.
One shining moment sums up for me Dianna’s everlasting legacy to all of us. On Sunday, February 14, the doctors advised Marie Dennis and me that as soon as possible we should celebrate the Sacrament of the Sick with her.
Let me first say that this encounter with the Lord reveals something of the unimaginable beauty in His loving care for us. To quote just one of the consoling and encouraging prayers of this Sacrament which sums up that beauty: “Father in heaven, through this holy anointing grant our dear Dianna comfort in her suffering. When she is afraid, give her courage; when afflicted, give her patience; when dejected, afford her hope; and when alone, assure her of the support of your holy people. We ask this in the name of Him who also walked this path, Christ, Our Savior.”
Dianna received our anointing with attention and gratitude. She repeatedly spoke of conversations she was having with God, and her abiding conviction that He/She is Mercy itself and gave thanks for the numerous people who had graced her life.
Literally she ministered to Marie and to me, who had gone to be ministers for her. Personally, as a priest for many years and having been at the bedside of countless numbers of dying people, I never experienced what I did that Sunday morning. God for me was almost palpably present thanks to the spirit of this dear person who has now left us.
The great 20th century theologian, Karl Rahner, was asked near the end of his life if he still believed all the things he had written about God. His answer helps us appreciate what we were witnessing as Dianna Ortiz passes from this life into eternity. He said: “One thing I’m sure of – that when I die I will fall into the arms of a loving God.”
(Joe Nangle OFM is a Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace. As a member of the Assisi Community in Washington, D.C., he is dedicated to simple living and social change. Joe also serves as the Pastoral Associate for the Latino community at Our Lady Queen of Peace, Arlington, Virginia.)
Oh, Lord give us a double portion of her spirit!
Paul Magno, February 20, 2021
I was shocked to hear just last week that Dianna was admitted to hospice care with only days to live. To learn on Friday that her life had ended only compounded that shock.
I spent less than a year on TASSC's staff two decades ago under her leadership. What I carried away with me from that encounter with the TASSC community was their beautiful spirit.
Hope and possibility persisting, defying horrific experiences among survivors, and all in the sacred circle blessed and affirmed.
So much of that ethos was imparted and cultivated by Dianna, reflecting her living victory over all things deadening. It was and is cherished heart-work more than anything. She led and taught that but I remember most how she embodied that way of being. Her eyes and her smile: gentle, tenacious vitality.
Oh, Lord give us a double portion of her spirit!
The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey From Torture to Truth
By Sister Dianna Ortiz and Patricia Davis (Orbis Books)
Watch interview, Dianna Ortiz & Patricia Davis: https://www.c-span.org/video/?160520-1/guatemala
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A shining light
Dianna Ortiz presente!
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