The Blindfold's Eyes

Sister Dianna Ortiz' story of torture and healing

She was an American nun teaching Mayan children in Guatemala when she was abducted by government security forces on November 2, 1989. Taken to a secret torture center in Guatemala City, she was subjected to a horrific ordeal that changed her life forever. She suffered more than 100 cigarette burns on her body while being interrogated. She was lowered into a rat-infested pit filled with decomposing bodies and victims not yet dead. Her hand was forcibly held to a knife as one of her torturers stabbed another female prisoner to death. She was brutally gang-raped by her torturers. But unlike most of the victims of the Guatemalan government's terror campaign, Sister Dianna lived to tell of what happened to her.

What makes her story especially disturbing is the complicity of her own government in her torture. The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan death squads responsible for torturing countless victims, including Sister Dianna. Her torturers answered to an American whom they called "Alejandro." Her ordeal ended when "Alejandro" removed her from the torture center, noting the international notoriety of her abduction, and drove her ostensibly to meet "a friend" at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. Having every reason not to trust "Alejandro," she escaped him, and with help from fellow missionaries, she made her way back to the U.S. And in spite of repeated efforts to obtain information from the U.S. government, "Alejandro" has never been identified.

Her abduction was an embarrassment to the U.S. government. Embassy officials, along with the Guatemalan government, tried to discredit her story. The U.S. Embassy circulated a rumor that her abduction was faked to cover up a lesbian affair that had turned sour. When a delegation headed by her religious order met with Embassy officials in Guatemala in March 1990, political affairs officer Lew Anselem was quoted as saying, "I'm tired of all these lesbian nuns coming down to Guatemala." Ambassador Thomas Stroock, who was present at the meeting when the comment was made, did not object to it. Later, in an unrelated investigation on clandestine activities, a former special agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency said he was at the U.S. embassy in Guatemala a week after the November 1989 incident, and he was jokingly asked by a group of agents and embassy officials "if Dianna Ortiz had been good at sex." He denied that he was the American who participated in her rape and torture. He also noted that those present seemed amused by Sister Dianna's ordeal.¹

Sister Dianna was so traumatized by her ordeal that in the beginning she remembered little of what happened to her. Gradually she regained her ability to deal with her torture. She began a healing process that continues to this day. Along with other torture survivors, she formed the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), of which she is Executive Director. Through this organization she has honored the promise she made to other victims of torture who did not live to tell of what happened to them: "I will never forget you. I will tell the world what I have seen and heard."

Sister Dianna's story is powerfully told in her book, The Blindfold's Eyes. (Read a review)

Read Testimony of Sister Dianna before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus Briefing on Torture, June 25, 1998.

Listen to Sister Dianna tell her story...