{"id":48441,"date":"2021-02-22T03:45:51","date_gmt":"2021-02-22T03:45:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=165173"},"modified":"2021-02-22T03:45:51","modified_gmt":"2021-02-22T03:45:51","slug":"sister-dianna-ortiz-us-nun-who-survived-guatemala-torture-and-became-human-rights-champion-dies-at-62","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/22\/sister-dianna-ortiz-us-nun-who-survived-guatemala-torture-and-became-human-rights-champion-dies-at-62\/","title":{"rendered":"Sister Dianna Ortiz\u2014US Nun Who Survived Guatemala Torture and Became Human Rights Champion\u2014Dies at 62"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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<\/a> Friday in Washington, D.C. at the age of 62 after battling cancer. <\/p>\n

“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.” 
\u2014Sister Dianna Ortiz<\/span><\/p>\n

Ortiz\u2014who wanted to be a nun since she was a little girl\u2014joined 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. <\/p>\n

Years later Ortiz explained<\/a> that she wanted “to teach young indigenous children to read and write… and to understand the Bible in their culture.”<\/p>\n

It was dangerous work at a dangerous time. Guatemala was ravaged by decades of civil war that followed a 1954 CIA coup<\/a> deposing Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically-elected progressive president. U.S.-backed right-wing military dictatorships, some of which perpetrated<\/a> genocidal violence against the country’s Mayan population, followed. <\/p>\n

The 36-year civil war left over 200,000<\/a> Guatemalans dead, more than 600 villages destroyed, and countless people\u2014mostly Mayan peasants\u2014displaced.<\/p>\n

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Sister 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.https:\/\/t.co\/6lPoTH7EMZ<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Amnesty International USA (@amnestyusa) February 21, 2021<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

“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<\/a> the literary magazine Agni<\/em> in a 1998 interview. “No family was untouched.”<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

“She had a great love for the Guatemalans,” explained Luisa Bickett, another Ursuline sister who worked in San Miguel. <\/p>\n

“I heard a man’s deep voice behind me: ‘Hello, my love,’ he said in Spanish. ‘We have some things to discuss.'”
\u2014Ortiz<\/span><\/p>\n

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 Bel\u00e9n, a convent and religious retreat 170 miles (270 km) from San Miguel in Antigua.<\/p>\n

On November 2, Ortiz was reading in the convent\u2019s garden when her life was forever changed. In an interview with Kerry Kennedy, she recalled<\/a> that: <\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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. She was raped again. Then:<\/p>\n

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I was lowered into a pit full of bodies\u2014bodies 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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Our 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<\/a> https:\/\/t.co\/n260jDVlp4<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Pax Christi USA (@PaxChristiUSA) February 19, 2021<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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 the home of the the Vatican representative in Guatemala City, who had offered Ortiz refuge.<\/p>\n

“Diana wanted to take a bath,” Chmielewski recalled. “I helped her wash and saw all the cigarette burns… she just cried and took baths.”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

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I 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<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) February 20, 2021<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Ortiz’s torment continued as she sought\u2014and was denied\u2014justice. U.S. embassy officials accused<\/a> her of staging her abduction in a bid to thwart the George H.W. Bush administration’s military aid to Guatemala. Cigarette burns\u2014111 of them, according to a U.S. doctor who examined her\u2014told a different story.<\/p>\n

“The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army’s death squads\u2014my torturers themselves.”
\u2014Ortiz<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/a> to discredit another Ursuline nun, Dorothy Kazel of Cleveland, Ohio, who along with three other American churchwomen was kidnapped, raped, and executed <\/a>in El Salvador by U.S.-backed troops in 1980.<\/p>\n

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, Ortiz made three trips to Guatemala to testify against the government there.<\/p>\n

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