Sister Dianna Ortiz, 62, died while in hospice care in Washington early February 19, 2021 after a return of cancer.
Friends reported that Ortiz had tested positive for the coronavirus in the fall while on a trip to New Mexico. Although she had mild symptoms and was able to return to Washington, she continued to feel ill for weeks afterward. Medical tests February 12 discovered inoperable cancer.
“She was unfailingly good. Dianna walked through the very worst of hell and came out with love.
“It’s hard to believe that bad things happen to good nuns, but they do. The only sense I can make out of it is that evil is threatened by the love it cannot bear. 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.”
– Ursuline Sister Larraine Lauter, who became friends with Ortiz when they were seniors in high school. They entered the Ursuline Sisters of Mount St. Joseph in Maple Mount, Kentucky, a year apart.
Dianna Ortiz's parents, who were Mexican immigrants, tell her that at age six she stated that she wanted to be a nun. For a decade she taught kindergarten in Kentucky before deciding that she felt called to follow Jesus' example and work with the poor. Since the late 1960s, progressive nuns had been in the forefront of movements for social justice, and many who had once served the poor now lived among them. Dianna knew sisters who lived on mission in developing countries, some of whom had been radicalized by their work under repressive regimes. And she, too, wanted to become a missionary.
Ortiz entered the Ursuline Order. And, in September 1987, she left for a remote Mayan village in the Guatemalan highlands. San Miguel Acatan had been hard-hit during the country's civil war. The Guatemalan Army had killed more than one-hundred-fifty thousand in an attempt to "cleanse" the rural areas of people they suspected of sympathizing with the guerrillas and to instill fear in the community.
"Every family in San Miguel had people who had been tortured, disappeared or killed," said Ursuline Sister Mary Elizabeth (Mimi) Ballard, who had arrived a year earlier. "No family was untouched."
Still, Dianna adjusted easily to missionary life. The poverty in San Miguel was startling, and she had a tough time learning the indigenous Kanjobal language. But her sisters remember Dianna's delight when local women gave her hand-woven blouses and strung ribbon through her long brown hair. It was what nuns call the honeymoon of mission life, when newly arrived missionaries are overjoyed by the warmth of the local people and the simplicity of their lives, before fully realizing the long-term effects of scarcity and war.
Although the sisters avoided activities that could be construed as political, in September of 1988 the local bishop told them that he had received a letter accusing the sisters of working with the guerrillas. Four months later the sisters received a letter addressed to Madre Dianna: "Be careful. People want to hurt you." Two similar ones followed. Ballard suspected that the intent was to frighten church people into abandoning their work with the poor, or perhaps it was a case of mistaken identity, but no one was sure why Dianna was targeted when she returned to San Miguel.
The local priest assured the sisters the letters were idle threats and that the military left foreigners alone. But when Dianna went to Guatemala City to study Spanish, a man grabbed her on the street. "He said, 'We know who you are,'" Dianna told the sisters. "And he told me to leave the country."
Shaken, Ortiz flew to the Ursuline motherhouse in Maple Mount, Kentucky. Some sisters hoped that she would stay in the United States, but Dianna was determined to return to San Miguel. She felt his was a call, and she couldn't turn her back on the call.
She returned to San Miguel where she received two more letters, more ominous in tone: "Eliminate Dianna, assassinate, decapitate, rape," the first one said. "The army knows you are here. Leave the country," the second warned. But Dianna insisted on staying. In her journal she asked God to immerse her more fully into the lives of the Guatemalan people.
Then on November 2, 1989, Sister Ortiz was abducted by military security forces and taken to a compound where she was gang raped, hung by a rope over rotting corpses being eaten by rats, and burned with cigarettes. Her torturers also forced her to hold a knife while they plunged it into the body of a female victim.
“According to Dianna's accounts …
“On the morning of November 2, two men abducted her from an enclosed garden at the retreat center and forced her to board a bus for a nearby town. There they took an unmarked police car driven by a uniformed policeman to the Antigua Escuela Politacnica, an old military academy in Guatemala City.
“In a dark room, the men questioned her, burning her with cigarettes however she answered. They asked her to identify 'subversives' in photographs, claiming she was among them. When she protested, her assailants knocked her to the ground, poured wine over her body, and took turns raping her.”
(Julia Lieblich. “Pieces of Bone.” Agni Literary Review. http://www.webdelsol.com/AGNI/asp98-jl.htm)
What happened next, Ortiz acknowledges, has been toughest for people to believe …
“Her assailants, she says, took her outside and lowered her into a pit filled with rats, decomposing bodies, and half-dead prisoners, their limbs flailing in pain. She passed out and awoke in a room where a female prisoner lay bruised and bloodied on a cot.
“An assailant then handed Dianna what she thought was a small machete or knife and, placing his hands on hers, forced her to thrust it into the other woman's chest.
“After 24 hours of torment, the men were about to begin raping her again when a tall, fair-skinned man, whom she had heard them refer to earlier as Alejandro, or 'the boss,' arrived. He ordered them to stop, saying that she was a North American nun and her disappearance had become public. He told her in unaccented English that the abduction had been a mistake and they had confused her with guerrilla leader Veronica Ortiz Hernandez. And he said that she should forgive them for what they had done. He told her he would take her to a friend at the nearby American embassy, who would help her leave the country. When his jeep stopped in traffic, however, she opened the door and fled and she eventually found sanctuary in the Vatican Headquarters.”
(Julia Lieblich. “Pieces of Bone.” Agni Literary Review. http://www.webdelsol.com/AGNI/asp98-jl.htm)
“The Boss” also said that they had tried to prevent this with the letters. Although "Alejandro" continued to speak in Spanish, he understood Sister Ortiz when she spoke in English, and he spoke Spanish with a North American accent. In Sister Ortiz's statements, she indicates that she believes that this man was from the United States.
Back in the United States, Sister Ortiz remained badly traumatized. She could not remember much about her past and was overwhelmed by feelings of shame, filth, fear, humiliation, and anger. Sleep-deprived and troubled by nightmares, she flinched in the presence of men in uniforms or anyone with a cigarette. Sister Ortiz decided to abort the fetus that resulted from the gang rapes, and this only intensified her feelings of 'contamination' in the presence of other nuns.
After returning to the U.S., Ortiz demanded answers about U.S. involvement in her kidnapping specifically and in Guatemala’s civil war generally. She began a hunger strike and vigil outside the White House, and her efforts eventually led to the release of classified documents about U.S. involvement in Guatemala.
Soon after Dianna's abduction, the documents show, the ambassador began questioning "the motives and timing behind [her] story." A debate on U.S. aid to Guatemala was scheduled in Congress-aid the Bush Administration strongly supported-and in a November 1989 cable to Secretary of State James Baker, the ambassador suggested that the abduction could have been "a hoax" to pressure the U.S. to cut off funding.
Guatemalan officials went further. Defense minister Hector Gramajo said that Dianna had invented the story to cover up her involvement in a violent "lesbian tryst," according to the 1996 Annual Report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. ABC News tracked the lesbian rumor to U.S. Embassy Human Rights Officer W. Lewis Amselem, who vehemently denied the charge.
The former U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala, Thomas Stroock said that he didn't place much stock in Gutierrez's conclusions because he "examined her after several months." In fact, Gutierrez's medical report was dated November 8, 1989, just six days after her abduction. (Dr. G.R. Gutierrez of Grants, New Mexico attested to "one-hundred-eleven second-degree circular burns approximately one cm. across" on the sister's back.)
One of the saddest dimensions of her difficult and arduous healing journey is the way in which she was often humiliated and betrayed by those closest to her who were supposed to serve her best interests: health care officials, lawyers, members of her religious community, and friends. Sister Ortiz had to steel herself against other formidable enemies as well, including Guatemalan officials who called her abduction a "self-kidnapping" and a "hoax."
Even worse, she was vilified and slandered by American officials as she spoke her mind against torture in a series of interviews, speeches, vigils, lawsuits, and investigations by six agencies. The search for those who kidnapped continues as does the stonewalling by governmental representatives. As a start, she has called for a declassification of U.S. government documents containing information on human rights abuses in Guatemala.
(Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. Book review The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/)
Surprisingly few of the declassified State Department documents discuss Alejandro. A March 19, 1990 cable states: "We need to close the loop on the issue of the 'North American' named by Ortiz. . . . THE EMBASSY IS VERY SENSITIVE ON THIS ISSUE."
Officials would become even more sensitive as public support for Ortiz in the United States grew. Soon embassy officials were professing sympathy for the tortured nun.
And on April 10, 1990, in what looked like a dramatic turnaround, Stroock wrote the following to Ortiz's lawyer:
"I know, from my own personal observation, that she was seriously beaten and mistreated. She suffered a horrible, traumatic experience. As a fellow human being and the father of four daughters, I have suffered for her and prayed for her. No one in this Mission has any reason to disbelieve [her] sworn affidavit."
Still, Stroock went on voicing doubts about her story long after the abduction. "If you write a story that says it happened, you're liable to be in big trouble. There's not one shred of evidence to prove that it happened,” he said.
But the seriousness of her claims, and the suggestion of possible U.S. complicity in human rights abuses, demanded a more thorough look at the plausibility of her allegations.
Clearly the U.S. Embassy had its own agenda. But even some of her supporters admitted privately that they doubted Dianna's depiction of the pits, which sounded too fantastic to be believable, and wondered whether Dianna's torturers would force her to assist in the killing of another woman. Were there any precedents for such behavior? And in such a traumatized state, could any survivor be trusted to tell the truth?
(Julia Lieblich. “Pieces of Bone.” Agni Literary Review. http://www.webdelsol.com/AGNI/asp98-jl.htm)
Only after years of extensive therapy at the Marjorie Kovler Center in Chicago for survivors of torture did Ortiz start to recover, at which point she began to hunt down information about her case.
Sister Dianna Ortiz wrote the memoir, The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey From Torture to Truth, which was published in 2004. She went on to become a global champion for people subjected to torture, and her case would help compel the release of classified documents showing decades of US complicity in human rights abuses in Guatemala during its 36-year civil war, in which 200,000 civilians were killed. Sister Ortiz became the director of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) in Washington, D.C.
“Guatemala, a country
where
hard-working men and women live
in harmony,
in those
mountains and forests,
smiling like the flowers in the
gardens,
just like the birds with their
songs in the mountains; but one
day
they killed those human beings
without knowing what they
had done
Why did they have to die this way?”
– Untitled. Ana Luisa Catalino (Mam), Stereo Acodim, Nampix Ixtahuacán, Huehuetenango
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