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Sister Dianna Ortiz--US Nun Who Survived Guatemala Torture and Became Human Rights Champion--Dies at 62
"Dianna walked through the very worst of hell and came out with love... Her legacy is a witness to nonviolence and to love in the face of evil and to redemption. That's her legacy, to teach us that that's possible."
Feb 20, 2021
Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico whose 1989 abduction, rape, and torture by U.S.-backed Guatemalan forces led to her becoming an outspoken peace, human rights, and anti-torture activist, died Friday in Washington, D.C. at the age of 62 after battling cancer.
"I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth. I am still waiting."
--Sister Dianna Ortiz
Ortiz--who wanted to be a nun since she was a little girl--joined the Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph, part of a 400-year-old Roman Catholic order dedicated to the education of girls and the care of the sick and needy, when she was still a teenager. She taught kindergarten for a decade before moving to Guatemala in 1987 at the age of 28.
Years later Ortiz explained that she wanted "to teach young indigenous children to read and write... and to understand the Bible in their culture."
It was dangerous work at a dangerous time. Guatemala was ravaged by decades of civil war that followed a 1954 CIA coup deposing Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected progressive president. U.S.-backed right-wing military dictatorships, some of which perpetrated genocidal violence against the country's Mayan population, followed.
The 36-year civil war left over 200,000 Guatemalans dead, more than 600 villages destroyed, and countless people--mostly Mayan campesinos--displaced.
\u201cSister Dianna Ortiz committed her life to advocating for human rights and defending justice, freedom and human dignity. Her dedication, compassion and bravery will be greatly missed.\nhttps://t.co/6lPoTH7EMZ\u201d— Amnesty International USA (@Amnesty International USA) 1613867615
"Every family in San Miguel had people who had been tortured, disappeared, or killed," Mary Elizabeth Ballard, an Ursuline sister who had arrived in Guatemala a year before Ortiz, told the literary magazine Agni in a 1998 interview. "No family was untouched."
By early 1989 Ortiz was receiving threatening letters imploring her to leave Guatemala. She eventually did depart, traveling to the Urusline motherhouse in Kentucky. But only for a short while.
"She had a great love for the Guatemalans," explained Luisa Bickett, another Ursuline sister who worked in San Miguel.
"I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.'"
--Ortiz
Ortiz returned to Guatemala in September 1989. By the following month, she was receiving death threats. For her safety, Ortiz decided to seek refuge at Posada de Belen, a convent and religious retreat 170 miles (270 km) from San Miguel in Antigua.
On November 2, Ortiz was reading in the convent's garden when her life was forever changed. In an interview with Kerry Kennedy, she recalled that:
I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.' I turned to see the morning sunlight glinting off a gun held by a man who had threatened me once before on the street. He and his partner forced me onto a bus, then into a police car where they blindfolded me.
We came to a building and they led me down some stairs. They left me in a dark cell, where I listened to the cries of a man and woman being tortured. When the men returned, they accused me of being a guerrilla and began interrogating me. For every answer I gave them, they burned my back or my chest with cigarettes. Afterwards, they gang-raped me repeatedly.
Ortiz was then moved to another room with another woman prisoner. Some men returned with a video camera and a machete, which Ortiz thought would be used to torture her. Instead, she says she was forced to kill the other woman.
"What I remember is blood gushing, spurting like a water fountain... and my cries lost in the cries of the woman," she recalled. Her captors then threatened to release video of her attacking the woman if she refused to cooperate. Then:
I was lowered into a pit full of bodies--bodies of children, men, and women, some decapitated, all caked with blood. A few were still alive. I could hear them moaning... A stench of decay rose from the pits. Rats swarmed over the bodies... I passed out and when I came to I was lying on the ground beside the pit, rats all over me.
Ortiz said that a North American man her torturers called "Alejandro" was present during her ordeal. When he realized she was an American, he helped her get dressed and drove her away while apologizing. "He said he was... working to liberate [Guatemala] from communism," Ortiz recalled.
\u201cOur statement on the death of our beloved friend & colleague, Dianna Ortiz, OSU. Our heartbreak & grief are only tempered by our gratitude & love for all Dianna has been for us, & for the rest and peace that she now has. #DiannaOrtiz https://t.co/n260jDVlp4\u201d— Pax Christi USA (@Pax Christi USA) 1613746400
Darleen Chmielewski, a Franciscan nun who was one of the first people to see Ortiz after her escape, described her friend as in "a state of shock." The two women went to the home of the the Vatican representative in Guatemala City, who had offered Ortiz refuge.
"Diana wanted to take a bath," Chmielewski recalled. "I helped her wash and saw all the cigarette burns... she just cried and took baths."
Two days later, Ortiz was back in the United States. "After escaping from my torturers, I returned home to New Mexico so traumatized that I recognized no one, not even my parents," she told Kennedy. "I had virtually no memory of my life before my abduction; the only piece of my identity that remained was that I was a woman who was raped and forced to torture and murder another human being."
Ortiz also felt forced to do something unimaginable for many nuns. "I got pregnant as a result of the multiple gang rapes," she told Kennedy. "Unable to carry within me... what I could only view as a monster, I turned to someone for assistance and I destroyed that life."
"I felt I had no choice," explained Ortiz. "If I had had to grow within me what the torturers left me I would have died."
\u201cI first met Sr. Dianna Ortiz when she was on hunger strike in front of the Clinton White House in 1995. I was later honored to know her & to support her quest for justice. It is long past due for her torturers to be held accountable & CIA docs declassified https://t.co/pZ6MHw3kMz\u201d— jeremy scahill (@jeremy scahill) 1613863159
Ortiz's torment continued as she sought--and was denied--justice. U.S. embassy officials accused her of staging her abduction in a bid to thwart the George H.W. Bush administration's military aid to Guatemala. Cigarette burns--111 of them, according to a U.S. doctor who examined her--told a different story.
"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads--my torturers themselves."
--Ortiz
In a bizarre twist, Guatemalan officials claimed Ortiz faked her kidnapping to cover up a violent lesbian affair, a rumor subsequently spread by U.S. officials. Previously, the Reagan administration had undertaken a similar effort to discredit another Ursuline nun, Dorothy Kazel of Cleveland, Ohio, who along with three other American churchwomen was kidnapped, raped, and executed in El Salvador by U.S.-backed troops in 1980.
Even though she was back in the relative safety of the United States, Ortiz received menacing phone calls and anonymous packages, one containing a dead mouse wrapped in a Guatemalan flag. However, undaunted, she made three trips to Guatemala to testify against the government there.
Ortiz tasted victory, albeit of a largely symbolic nature, in April 1995, when a federal judge in Boston ordered Gen. Hector Gramajo, the Guatemalan defense minister who had tried to discredit Ortiz, to pay her and eight other torture victims a combined $47.5 million.
In 1996 Ortiz held a five-week fasting vigil in front of the White House, where she demanded that the U.S. government declassify all documents about human rights abuses in Guatemala since the 1954 coup. Hillary Clinton, then first lady, invited Ortiz to her office. During their meeting, Clinton did not rule out the possibility that "Alejandro" was a past or current U.S. operative.
Ortiz's relentless pursuit of justice eventually compelled the United States to declassify long-secret documents revealing details of U.S. cooperation with Guatemalan security forces before, during, and after the time of her abduction, including an admission that the U.S. embassy was in contact with members of a death squad.
The documents also showed that Gen. Gramajo had been trained in counterinsurgency tactics at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), where military and police officials from Latin American allies--many of them dictatorships--were instructed in counterinsurgency and democracy suppression using course manuals that advocated the torture and execution of civilians.
\u201cSr Dianna Ortiz, Presente With deep sadness on your passing, we celebrate your life and witness for peace and justice, to end torture, and to hold the US government accountable. Our solidarity with @PaxChristiUSA @TASSCintl https://t.co/wz1Xt9MtCu\u201d— SOAWatch (@SOAWatch) 1613832975
The files also proved that the U.S. was supporting Guatemalan forces guilty of perpetrating genocide. In 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. role in the bloodshed, terror, and repression.
"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads--my torturers themselves," Ortiz later wrote. "The United States was the Guatemalan army's partner in a covert war against a small opposition force, a war the United Nations would later declare genocidal."
Ortiz's suffering left her with an acute awareness of human rights issues and a desire to work in service of those rights. In 1998 she founded Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), and in 2002 published The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. In the 2000s Ortiz was a vocal opponent of the George W. Bush's torture program in the so-called War on Terror.
Last year, she was named deputy director of Pax Christi USA, part of an international Catholic peace movement.
\u201c\u201cThe Blindfold\u2019s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth\u201d was my intro to international human rights abuses & how often the U.S gov & the CIA are part of the story (or responsible). Thank you for sharing your pain & fighting for others, descansa en paz Sister Dianna Ortiz.\u201d— Catalina Cruz, Esq. (@Catalina Cruz, Esq.) 1613959295
Recently, Ortiz worked for nuclear disarmament and led Pax Christi's work commemorating the 75th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
As for her recovery, Ortiz wrote in The Blindfold's Eyes that despite years of therapy at Chicago's Marjorie Kovler Center for torture survivors, "no one ever fully recovers" from torture, "not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."
Ortiz never not stopped searching for the whole truth of what happened to her back in 1989.
"No one ever fully recovers, not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."
--Ortiz
"I demand the right to a future built on truth and justice," she told Kennedy. "My torturers were never brought to justice. It is possible that, individually, they will never be identified or apprehended. But I cannot resign myself to this fact and move on. I have a responsibility to the people of Guatemala and to the people of the world to insist on accountability where it is possible."
"I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth," said Ortiz. "I am still waiting."
Ursuline Sister Larraine Lauter was with Ortiz when she passed away on Friday. Lauter called her friend "unfailingly good."
"Dianna walked through the very worst of hell and came out with love," she told the Catholic Standard. "It's hard to believe that bad things happen to good nuns, but they do. Her legacy is for us to be nonviolent. Her legacy is a witness to nonviolence and to love in the face of evil and to redemption. That's her legacy, to teach us that that's possible."
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Former US-Backed Salvadoran Colonel Sentenced by Spanish Court to 133 Years in Prison for 1989 Jesuit Massacre
Col. Inocente Orlando Montano led an elite U.S.-trained army unit that massacred six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter during El Salvador's 12-year civil war.
Sep 14, 2020
A Spanish court last week sentenced a former U.S.-backed Salvadoran army colonel and government official to 133 years in prison for the murder of five Spanish Jesuit priests during the Central American country's civil war.
The Guardianreports Inocente Orlando Montano, 77, was found guilty of "terrorist murder" by Spain's highest criminal court, the Audiencia Nacional, in Madrid on Friday. Montano also served as El Salvador's vice-minister of public security at the time of the 1989 Jesuit massacre.
\u201cSOA graduate Inocente Montano, former Minister of Security of El Salvador, was found guilty today & sentenced to 133 years by a Spanish court for the Nov 1989 murders of the Jesuit priests in El Salvador. https://t.co/LYBPxVn0nN\u201d— SOAWatch (@SOAWatch) 1599848270
The five Spanish priests, along with one Salvadoran Jesuit priest, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter, were murdered on November 16, 1989 by members of the elite Atlacatl Battalion, which was created, armed, trained, and funded by the United States.
According to a report by El Salvador's postwar United Nations Truth Commission, Atlacatl troops disguised as rebels rounded up five of the six priests--university rector Ignacio Ellacuria Beas Coechea, vice-rector Ignacio Martin-Baro, social sciences dean Segundo Montes, Juan Ramon Moreno, and Amando Lopez--before ordering them to lie face-down on the ground in a garden where they were executed.
The attackers then discovered Father Joaquin Lopez y Lopez and killed him too, along with housekeeper Julia Elba Ramos and her 15-year-old daughter Celina Ramos.
\u201c'I Miss Them, Always': A Witness Recounts El Salvador's 1989 Jesuit Massacre https://t.co/atWoL4qcZr\u201d— Luis Herr\u00e1n (@Luis Herr\u00e1n) 1599927737
The Spanish court could not convict Montano for murdering Lopez, Ramos, or her daughter because his extradition to Spain under the legal concept of universal jurisdiction--which posits that national courts may prosecute serious human rights crimes regardless of where they occur--did not apply to those cases.
Almudena Bernabeu, a Spanish human rights lawyer and member of the prosecution team in the Montano case, said the verdict shows the importance of universal jurisction.
"It doesn't really matter if 30 years have passed, the pain of the relatives carries on," she said. "I think people forget how important these active efforts are to formalize and acknowledge that someone's son was tortured or someone's brother was executed."
Hailed by U.S. officials as "the pride of the United States military team in El Salvador," the unit Montano led committed some of the most horrific massacres of the 12-year Salvadoran Civil War. Atlacatl officers and troops--many of them trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA)--carried out mass rape and the wholesale murder of more than 900 villagers, mostly women, children, and the elderly, at El Mozote on December 11, 1981, to name but one of its many crimes.
According to a Truth Commission report, 26 Salvadoran soldiers were involved in the Jesuit massacre. Of these, 19 were SOA graduates, including Gen. Juan Rafael Bustillo and three others soldiers believed to be responsible for the 1989 torture, rape, and murder of French Medecins Sans Frontieres nurse Madeleine Lagadec.
Elliott Abrams, the Reagan administration's "death squad ambassador" in Central America who is now the Trump administration's special representative for Iran and Venezuela, hailed the U.S. record in El Salvador as "one of fabulous achievement." More than 70,000 men, women, and children died during the Salvadoran Civil War. The Truth Commission investigation concluded that 85% of the more than 22,000 atrocities that were reported during the war were committed by the U.S.-backed military regime and associated forces.
Many of the perpetrators of war crimes and other human rights atrocities--including Montano--found refuge in the United States. Montano was jailed in the U.S. for immigration fraud and perjury before he was extradited to Spain in 2017.
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Five Men Sentenced to Life for Operation Condor Killings Trained at School of the Americas
Revelation comes after Italian court sentences 24 men to life behind bars for roles in U.S.-backed state terror campaign
Jul 17, 2019
Five of the 24 men sentenced last week by an Italian court to life in prison for their roles in a brutal and bloody U.S.-backed Cold War campaign against South American dissidents graduated from a notorious US Army school once known for teaching torture, assassination, and democracy suppression.
On July 8 judges in Rome's Court of Appeals sentenced the former Bolivian, Chilean, Peruvian and Uruguayan government and military officials after they were found guilty of kidnapping and murdering 23 Italian nationals in the 1970s and 1980s during Operation Condor, a coordinated effort by right-wing military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil--and, later, Peru and Ecuador--against perceived leftist threats. The campaign, which was characterized by kidnappings, torture, disappearances and murder, claimed an estimated 60,000 lives, according to human rights groups. Victims included leftists and other dissidents, clergy, intellectuals, academics, students, peasant and trade union leaders, and indigenous peoples.
The United States government--including military and intelligence agencies--supported Operation Condor with military aid, planning, and technical support as well as surveillance and torture training during the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations. Much of this support, which the U.S. attempted to justify within the context of the global Cold War struggle against communism, was based at U.S. military installations in Panama. It was there that the US Army opened the School of the Americas in 1946, which would graduate 11 Latin American heads of state over the following decades. None of them became their country's leader by democratic means, leading critics to dub the SOA "School of Assassins" and "School of Coups" because it produced so many of both.
SOA's most notorious graduates include narco-trafficking Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, the genocidal Guatemalan military dictator Efrain Rios Montt, Bolivian despot Hugo Banzer (known for sheltering Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie), Haitian death squad commander and military dictator Raoul Cedras and Argentine strongman Leopoldo Galtieri, who presided during a period of his country's "Dirty War" in which tens of thousands of innocent men and women were disappeared. Countless other war criminals have studied at the SOA, sometimes using U.S. manuals that taught kidnapping, torture, assassination, and democracy suppression techniques.
Some of the worst massacres and other atrocities perpetrated by U.S.-backed forces during the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1980s, including the slaughter of 900 villagers--mostly women and children--at El Mozote, the assassination of Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero and the rape and murder of four U.S. churchwomen who worked with him, were planned, committed or covered up by SOA graduates. So were a series of chainsaw massacres in Colombia, the murder of four Dutch journalists in El Salvador, the assassination of a former Chilean official and his U.S. aide in a 1976 car bombing in Washington, D.C. and many other atrocities.
It can now be revealed that several men sentenced to life in prison in Rome last week are also SOA graduates. According to a database of over 60,000 SOA alumni compiled from U.S. military records by School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), a Georgia-based activist group founded by Father Roy Bourgeois in 1990, five SOA trainees are among the 24 men found guilty by the Italian court. Two of them are named among SOAW's "most notorious SOA graduates": former Bolivian interior minister Luis Arce Gomez, who is currently serving a 30-year prison term for genocide, assassination and drug trafficking, and Luis Alfredo Maurente, a Uruguayan captain implicated in the torture and disappearance of nearly 100 people in Uruguay and Argentina. Arce Gomez completed communications, tactical officer and radio repair courses at SOA in 1958; Maurente attended SOA in 1969 and 1976, studying military intelligence. The three other SOA graduates uncovered among the 24 defendants are: Hernan Ramirez Ramirez (Chile; command course, 1970), Ernesto Avelino Ramas Pereira (Uruguay; motor officer course, 1962) and Pedro Antonio Mato Narbondo (Uruguay; unspecified, 1970).
SOA operated in Panama from 1946 until 1984, when it was relocated to Fort Benning, Georgia. In a bid to rebrand itself amid growing public outcry over graduate atrocities, SOA changed its named to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2000, with a greater emphasis on human rights. However, the school's alumni continue to make dubious headlines to this day, with four of the six generals behind the 2009 Honduran coup and former Mexican commandos now employed as mercenaries for international drug cartels among its more notorious recent alumni.
It is unclear whether many of the defendants in the Rome case will face justice, as all but one of the 24 were tried in absentia under the legal concept of universal jurisdiction. Uruguay, which does not allow for life sentences, has previously jailed people convicted of similar crimes. A January 2017 ruling by an Italian court had sentenced eight of the defendants, including the late former Bolivian dictator Luis Garcia Meza, former Peruvian president Francisco Morales Bermudez, and former Uruguayan foreign minister Juan Carlos Blanco-- who is now under house arrest in Montevideo--to life behind bars, while acquitting 19 others due to statutes of limitations. Those acquittals were reversed by Monday's appellate decision.
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