Sister Dianna Ortiz
Nun whose abduction raised questions over US foreign policy
SISTER DIANNA ORTIZ, who has died aged 62, was an Ursuline nun abducted and tortured by Guatemalan security forces in 1989; later she gave a graphic account of horrors inflicted, making headlines with the claim that her tormentors had been supervised by a mysterious “Alejandro”, who, she said, spoke halting Spanish “with a thick American accent”. His English, she insisted, “was American, flawless, unaccented”.
Her ordeal began on November 2 1989 when she was abducted from a small Roman Catholic mission in the mountain village of San Miguel Acatán, in the impoverished highlands of western Guatemala where she was teaching indigenous children; she was taken by car to a warehouse on the outskirts of Guatemala City.
Her kidnap lasted a day, but left lasting physical and psychological scars. She was burnt more than 100 times with cigarettes and repeatedly raped. Eventually she passed out and regained consciousness in a courtyard, where she saw a large block being removed from the ground. “There was a pit underneath and a horrible smell. I was lowered into the pit. It was filled with dead bodies … some were jerking,” she recalled. “I heard someone crying. I did not know if it was me or someone else.”
Taken back to her interrogation room, she was raped again. By her account her captors then invited “Alejandro” to “come have some fun”. But he told them to leave her alone, with the words: “Idiots, she is a North American … It’s already on the news on television.” He drove her to the city centre, but she escaped from the car on the way.
Her captors never gave her a reason, though ultra-right forces in Guatemala were known to believe that the Catholic Church was supporting Leftists in the country’s long-running civil war.
Sister Dianna claimed that she had become pregnant during the assaults and, after returning home, had had an abortion. The trauma left her with very little memory of her previous life and it took years of therapy before she started to recover.
When in 1990 she made formal charges against Guatemala’s security forces, the country’s defence minister denounced her allegations as a “fantasy” cooked up after a sadomasochistic
lesbian tryst went wrong.
Documents released later indicate that US officials also questioned her account. A 1989 cable from the embassy in Guatemala ran: “For a person who apparently knew little Spanish … had not slept for 24 hours, had suffered an intensive torture session … and in deep shock rendering her incapable of talking, Sister Dianna seemed to have little difficulty escaping by jumping out of a moving car, running at high speed, asking Guatemalans for protection.”
Over the years Sister Dianna pursued the matter through American and Guatemalan courts, gave interviews, staged a hunger strike and campaigned for the release of files on her case and on human rights abuses in Guatemala.
It was said to be the intervention in 1996 of the First Lady Hillary Clinton that led to the release of CIA papers and the declassification of decades of documents showing that Guatemalan forces implicated in acts of genocide during the 36-year civil war had been equipped and trained by the US. In 1999 President Bill Clinton apologised for involvement in Guatemala’s civil war.
Frustratingly, however, the CIA documents were heavily redacted and did not reveal the identity of the abductor called “Alejandro”.
One of eight children, Dianna Mae Ortiz was born on September 2 1958 in Colorado Springs, and entered the Ursuline novitiate in 1977. While undergoing her religious training, she qualified as an teacher. She moved to Guatemala in 1987.
After her ordeal she worked for the Guatemala Human Rights Commission and helped to found the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition.
Piers Morgan’s Life Stories
This latest edition of Life Stories promises to be an explosive one – and not just because the outspoken Rupert Everett once called Morgan “hung like budgie” (no one inquired as to how he knew). Still, such criticism will be like water off the supremely self-confident Morgan’s slippery back and this should be an hour of no-holds-barred gossip and tantalising titbits. ITV, unsurprisingly, is keeping the whole thing tightly under wraps but anyone who has read Everett’s louche diaries will know what to expect: the repressed Home Counties background, the mother he adored, the rigid Catholic boarding school and the subsequent rush to the bright lights of the Seventies and Eighties gay scene, an era about which he now feels a strong strain of melancholy.
There were films too, mostly as villains in period pieces or comedy sidekicks in US romcoms, but he was wonderful in spy drama Another Country, tapping expertly into what it means to lead a double life and, most recently, as his hero Oscar Wilde in 2018’s labour of love The Happy
Prince. An old trouper, he is sure to keep the conversation ticking along while throwing Morgan
the occasional new bone to chew on. Whatever else, it certainly won’t be dull.