Dianna Ortiz, nun brutalized by Guatemalan military, dies
With a human rights advocate, she wrote a 2002 memoir about her ordeal
Dianna Ortiz, a slight Catholic nun from New Mexico, arrived in Guatemala in 1987 in the midst of a decadeslong civil war pitting Marxist guerrillas against the U.S.-backed military that would ultimately claim 200,000 lives.
But, as a member of the Ursuline teaching order who came to the country to help Mayan children learn to read and write, and understand the Bible, she said she felt insulated from the killings and disappearances.
Over the next two years, she ignored menacing letters and a stranger who tried to intimidate her into leaving the country.
“I didn’t think the threats were something I should have taken seriously, because I was a U.S. citizen and I assumed that my citizenship would protect me,” she later told NPR. “But … that was not the case.”
The Guatemalan military’s abduction, gang rape and torture of Ortiz — who died Feb. 19 at 62 of cancer in Washington, D.C. — became a global news story when she claimed an American with ties to the U.S. Embassy was complicit in her ordeal.
She was forced to defend her credibility as a U.S. Embassy official said her account was a “hoax” to derail an aid package. The State Department eventually acknowledged there was “no reason not to believe” her.
Settling in Washington, Ortiz became an advocate of survivors of state-sanctioned violence and helped campaign to expose classified U.S. documents showing American links to human rights abuses in Guatemala. As a plaintiff in a lawsuit against a Guatemalan defense minister, she shared in a $47.5 million judgment in a U.S. court that concluded she was a victim of his “indiscriminate campaign of terror.”
Despite her small frame — at 5-foot3, she weighed less than 100 pounds — Ortiz exuded what Kerry Kennedy, president of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group, called “a combination of absolute, angelic innocence and this indescribable inner strength to stand up again and again every time she was brutalized.”
On Nov. 2, 1989, assailants identified by Ortiz as Guatemalan security forces abducted her from a convent garden in Antigua and drove her to a detention center in Guatemala City.
Targeted for working with the Indigenous community she said she was blindfolded and raped by three captors. They burned her with cigarettes as they demanded names of Indigenous subversives, she said. She was lowered into a pit with rats and decomposing bodies, and later forced to dismember another captive with a machete. She was told the killing was recorded to be used as blackmail if she attempted to seek redress, Ortiz said.
About a day later, a fourth man, called Alejandro, but whose accented Spanish led her to believe he was American, entered the torture chambers and ordered the others to stop.
Ortiz said she continued to struggle with forgiveness. “I leave that in God’s hands,” she told NPR. “… I’m not sure what it means to forgive.”
Ortiz is survived by her mother, Amby Ortiz of Grants, four brothers and two sisters.