Dianna Ortiz

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Sister Dianna Ortiz is a U.S Roman Catholic nun of the Ursuline order. She is a native of the state of New Mexico in the United States. While serving as a missionary in Guatemala in 1989, she was abducted by right-wing forces and brutally tortured. Among other torments she was gang-raped and suffered over 100 cigarette burns.

Sister Ortiz founded the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), the only organization in the United States founded by and for survivors of torture. TASSC's current policy campaign is dedicated to repealing the Military Commissions Act of 2006, what the survivors of torture at TASSC call the US Torture Law.

In early 1995 Sister Ortiz won $5 million in a U.S. civil court case against the former Minister of Defense of Guatemala — General Héctor Gramajo.[1]^[1] In its ruling, the judiciary stated that "[Gramajo-Morales]...was aware of and supported widespread acts of brutality committed under his command resulting in thousands of civilian deaths...." ^[2] and further noted that Gramajo-Morales “devised...[and] directed...[an] indiscriminate campaign of terror against civilians.”^[2] Five years after bringing her U.S. Civil Suit against Gramajo-Morales, Sister Ortiz won a judgment against the State of Guatemala through the Inter American Court of Human Rights where she specified that Gen. Gramajo "made several [official] statements to the effect that Sister Ortiz's injuries did not occur or were self-inflicted."^[3] At the time of its introduction Gen. Gramajo was attending Harvard University^[1] by invitation and had just given that year's commencement speech at the SOA.^[4] According to an article in International Socialist Review, Sister Ortiz stated that she was abducted by police officers and military personnel under Gramajo's command and taken to a secret prison where she was tortured and raped repeatedly.^[5] An excerpt from an interview with Sister Ortiz:

When the men returned, they had a video camera and a still camera. The policeman put a machete into my hands. Thinking it would be used against me, and at that point in my torture wanting to die, I did not resist. But the policeman put his hands onto the handle, on top of mine, and forced me to stab the woman again and again...

The policeman asked me if I was now ready to talk, and one of the other torturers...mentioned that they had just filmed...me stabbing the woman. If I refused to cooperate, their boss, Alejandro, would...turn the videotapes and the photographs over to the press.... This was the first I had heard of Alejandro, the torturers’ boss....

The policeman raped me again. 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. Someone was weeping. I didn’t know if it was me or somebody else. A stench of decay rose from the pit. Rats swarmed over the bodies and were dropped onto me as I hung suspended over the pit by the wrists. I passed out and when I came to I was lying on the ground beside the pit, rats all over me.

The nightmare I lived was nothing out of the ordinary. In 1989, under Guatemala’s first civilian president in years, nearly two hundred people were abducted. Unlike me, they were "disappeared, gone forever." The only uncommon element of my ordeal was that I survived, probably because I was a U.S. citizen, and phone calls poured into Congress when I was reported missing. As a U.S. citizen, I had another advantage: I could, in relative safety, reveal afterwards the details of what happened to me in those twenty-four hours. One of those details: an American was in charge of my torturers.

I remember the moment he removed my blindfold. I asked him, "Are you an American?" In poor Spanish and with a heavy American accent, he answered me with a question: "Why do you want to know?" Moments before, after the torturers had blindfolded me again and were getting ready to rape me again, they had called out in Spanish: "Hey, Alejandro, come and have some fun!" And a voice had responded "Shit!" in perfect American English with no trace of an accent. It was the voice of the tall, fair-skinned man beside me. After swearing, he’d switched to a halting Spanish. "Idiots!" he said. "She’s a North American nun." He added that my disappearance had been made public, and he ran them out of the room.

....He kept telling me he was sorry. The torturers had made a mistake. We came to a parking garage, where he put me into a gray Suzuki jeep and told me he was taking me to a friend of his at the U.S. embassy who would help me leave the country. For the duration of the trip, I spoke to him in English, which he understood perfectly. He said he was concerned about the people of Guatemala and consequently was working to liberate them from Communism. Alejandro told me to forgive my torturers because they had confused me with Veronica Ortiz Hernandez. It was an honest mistake.

I asked him how they could have mistaken me for a woman who did not resemble me in any way. And why were the threatening letters I had received addressed to Madre Dianna and not to Veronica Ortiz Hernandez? He avoided my questions and insinuated that I was to blame for my torture because I had not heeded the threats that were sent to me.^[6]

Sister Ortiz has recounted this same story, in formal testimony, on several occasions^[7] but declined to participate in presenting the case before the Inter-American Court on Human Rights as "testify[ing] about her abduction and torture is a tremendously painful--even terrifying--ordeal." ^[3]

She suspects that Alejandro may have been an employee of a U.S. agency.[2]

A 1996 report by the United States Intelligence Oversight Board reviewed Sister Ortiz' case and stated:

[T]he IOB believes that Sister Ortiz was subjected to horrific abuse on November 2, l989, but US intelligence reports provide little insight into the details of her plight. Because the Department of Justice is still conducting an extensive reinvestigation of the incident, we do not draw any conclusions on the case at this time.^[8]

In the "The Struggle against Impunity in Guatemala," published by the Journal of Social Justice, Vol. 26, 1999, by Raul Molina Mejia, author describes, the sister Oriz incident as an example of State Terrorism. He writes: "impunity as concrete legal or de facto actions taken by powerful sectors to prevent investigation or prosecution, such as amnesty laws, pardons, thwarting investigations, the hiding of documents, and tampering with legal samples were abundant in Guatemala. He also mentions the cases of Michael Devine, the El Aguacate massacre, the 1990 surge of killings at the National University of San Carlos, as well as the detention and torture of Sister Dianna Ortiz. The author explains the "political/psychological" aspect of this impunity, is "a dimension resulting from state terrorism, by which political options in a polity are restricted and controlled through the state's manipulation of fear."

[edit] Allegations of US involvement

Sister Ortiz suspects some involvement by US government personnel. According to Allan Narien's article "Murder as Policy" published in the The Nation, Vol. 260, April 24, 1995, the former United States Ambassador to Guatemala, Thomas F. Stroock (1989-1992), claims that Sister Ortiz's various claims amount to an allegation of U.S. involvement in her rape and torture by right wing para military forces.^{[citation needed]}