Dianna Mae Ortiz (September 2, 1958 – February 19, 2021) was an American Roman Catholic sister of the Ursuline order. While serving as a missionary in Guatemala, during its civil war, she was abducted on November 2, 1989 by members of the Guatemalan military, detained, raped, and tortured for 24 hours before being released. After her release, Ortiz reported that an American was among her captors. This part of her account could not be confirmed.
Ortiz pursued her case in a Guatemalan court and in a United States civil court. In the latter, she was the first to seek civil damages under the Torture Victim Protection Act passed in 1992. She filed a case against the Guatemalan Minister of Defense, General Héctor Gramajo, who was in power at the time of her abduction, arguing that he had command authority. In 1995, she was awarded $5 million in damages. She also filed a case with the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights.
In 1996, as a result of protests by Ortiz and others, as well as revelations of unauthorized CIA funding of the Guatemala military which had been prohibited by Congress in 1990, U.S. President Bill Clinton ordered the release of CIA papers associated with her case. Clinton also ordered the declassification of decades of documents related to U.S. relations with Guatemala. These showed that a Guatemalan colonel paid by the CIA was implicated in the deaths of the American Michael DeVine in 1990 and guerrilla leader in 1993. Congress closed down the CIA program.
The Center for Constitutional Rights represented Ortiz in her civil case and before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, which found in 1997 that the State of Guatemala had violated numerous articles of the American Convention on Human Rights in regard to Ortiz. It recommended that the government complete its long-delayed investigation and that it provide compensation to Ortiz.
Early life and education Ortiz was born on September 2, 1958, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the middle of eight children born to Ambrosia and Pilar Ortiz, a homemaker and uranium miner, respectively.Julia Lieblich, "Pieces of Bone", Agni, July 1998 Wanting the religious life from the time she was a child, Dianna entered the novitiate at age 17 at the Ursuline Sisters of Mount St. Joseph in Maple Mount, western Kentucky. Upon completion, she was accepted as a sister of the Ursuline Order.Donna Minkowitz, "Review: Dianna Ortiz, The Blindfold's Eye" , Salon.com, November 19, 2002
Dianna attended San Jose Elementary School and Sierra Vista Elementary School. For high school, she spent her freshman, sophomore, and junior years at Grants High School in New Mexico, while ending her senior year at Mount Saint Joseph Academy. In Ursuline, she taught children while being very young herself. Sister Dianna worked at the Ursuline Order for 43 years. Her parents were immigrants from Mexico and they spoke Spanish; eventually, through them, she learned to speak Spanish. Her father worked as a miner, while her mother worked around the house.
Career As a Catholic sister, Ortiz went to Guatemala in the 1987 for a two-year assignment to work with the poor and teach children to read. She joined sisters already working with the indigenous population in San Miguel Acatán and other small villages throughout the department of Huehuetenango. According to her account, in late 1988 the Bishop of Huehuetenango received an anonymous typed document accusing Ortiz and the other sisters in San Miguel of planning to meet with "subversives". This was followed in 1989 by written anonymous threats directed and delivered to Ortiz personally, while she was staying in more than one location, showing that she was under continued surveillance. In October 1989, she went to the retreat center of Posada de Belen in Antigua, Guatemala.
Abduction and torture Ortiz was abducted on November 2, 1989, from the garden of Posada de Belen. She said her captors were police officers who took her to a secret prison at a police academy (later identified as the Antigua Escuela Politécnica) in Guatemala City. There she was tortured and raped repeatedly under questioning.
Before being abducted and following her transfer from the Ursuline convent to Guatemala, Ortiz started getting death threats. In addition to being raped, and tortured repeatedly, Ortiz was forced to torture and stab another victim to death with a machete.
She said a man named Alejandro was among her torturers, and that she heard him speak English with a North American accent. She wrote in her memoir that her torture stopped
when a man with an American accent entered the room and said in English, "Shit." Then he said, in Spanish, to the torturers, "You idiots! Leave her alone. She's a North American, and it's all over the news." To Ortiz he said, "You have to forgive those guys, ... they made a mistake.
He was taking her to a friend (to be taken to the American embassy) when she escaped. She said he told her she had been mistaken for a guerrilla with a similar name, Verónica Ortiz Hernández. Ortiz knew this woman, an indigenous Guatemalan, and said she did not resemble her. When she questioned him about that, she said that Alejandro "insinuated that I was to blame for my torture because I had not heeded the threats that were sent to me."Speak Truth To Power Defender She returned to the U.S. from Guatemala within 48 hours of her escape.
After being released, Ortiz later said:
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.
She saw a doctor in Guatemala and another after she returned to the United States; both later submitted testimony that she showed evidence of torture, including extensive cigarette burns. Ortiz suffered greatly from her experience; like other torture victims, she lost many of her memories from the period before she went to Guatemala. After returning to the U.S., she had to be reintroduced to her family. It took her a long time to rebuild her trust in people. In addition, she later recounted, she learned she was pregnant from the rapes. Overwhelmed by the treatment she had received, she got an abortion. This added to her survivor's guilt and emotional burden. Ortiz was placed in a Catholic psychiatric asylum, where she would be under intense care. Under psychiatric care, she would become friends with another patient who would be influential in her recovery.
Guatemala's Civil War When Ortiz's abduction took place, Guatemala was experiencing a civil war that lasted 36 years since the early 1960s and mostly targeted Mayan people. The war was a conflict between right-wing politicians and communist movements. At the time the civil war began, Guatemala was under General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes' rule. Roughly 200,000 people were killed during these events, and 83 percent of them were Mayans – these civilians had been violated by the government and armed forces. Individuals and villages from socioeconomic backgrounds were also wiped out due to large massacres that were a result of government repression.
The United States intervened on behalf of Guatemala when the military forces there were abusing a number of human rights at the time of Ortiz's kidnapping. The United States trained "officers in counterinsurgency techniques and assisted the national intelligence apparatus". The methods employed by the military and administration of Guatemala made it possible for Ortiz to be kidnapped. Guatemala committed crimes, kidnappings, and brutal techniques without claiming accountability.
In 1977 the U.S. stopped providing military funding due to the human rights issues. Congress also imposed "imposing restrictions on military aid, citing human rights violations".
U.S. and Guatemala official denials of involvement
According to a Salon reviewer of Ortiz's 2002 memoir, "federal investigators and State Department officials made an active effort to cover up her ordeal and to discredit her – understandably, as the United States is the major source of funding for the Guatemalan military."
Former U.S. ambassador to Guatemala Thomas F. Stroock (1989–1992) said in 1995 that Ortiz's claims amounted to an allegation of U.S. involvement in her torture, which he denied. He said it was done by right-wing paramilitary forces in the country.Allan Nairn, "Murder as Policy", The Nation, vol. 260, April 24, 1995, as cited in Encyclopedia
The U.S government claimed that the allegations were false, stating that "items which were later found were intentionally placed in the garden to provide greater realism to the story of the kidnapping". Ortiz also explicitly mentions that General Héctor Gramajo, and General Carlos Morales told press that her abduction was a hoax. General Héctor Gramajo, the Chief of Staff of the Army, oversaw the troops who tortured and kidnapped Ortiz. In order to obscure their actions, they reported that Ortiz's injuries were caused by a "lesbian love tryst". President George W. Bush of the United States, took part in the denial that the Guatemalan military was involved in the crime in order to preserve their relationships with the military there. Guatemalan military was protected under US law and worked for the US government.
Despite the denials, the Commission, also known as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, ruled that Ortiz was telling the truth and that all of the accusations made against the Guatemalan military were legitimate. The administration was held accountable for the atrocities perpetrated against Ortiz since they linked more violent activities on behalf of Guatemalan citizens to officials in the government.
Ortiz eventually won her case against General Héctor Gramajo and it was ruled that he would never be allowed to enter the U.S.
Guatemalan media lobby In a 1996 widely recounted interview with Ortiz on the TV news program Nightline, American journalist Cokie Roberts contested Ortiz's claim that an American was among her captors. Roberts implied that Ortiz was lying about the entire episode, despite the fact that Ortiz later won a lawsuit against a Guatemalan general she accused in the case."U.S. Judge Orders Guatemalan to Pay for Atrocities". Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext): 16. April 13, 1995. Web. June 9, 2014. It was later revealed that Patton Boggs, the law firm of Roberts' brother Tom Boggs, was paid by the Guatemalan government to promote a more positive image of the regime, which was widely criticized internationally for human rights abuses. Patton Boggs ran a smear campaign against Ortiz.
According to an article on Pamela Brogan's report The Torturers' Lobby (1993), published by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), Guatemala was among several nations known to commit torture and human rights abuses and that had paid U.S. lobbying firms high fees to help keep U.S. funds going to it and "to gloss over its wretched human rights reputation".Julie Gozan, "The Torturers' Lobby", Multinational Monitor, April 1993, accessed June 14, 2013 For instance, in 1991, the major lobbying firm of Patton, Boggs, & Blow in Washington, DC, was paid $220,000 by Guatemala. Based on the CPI report, Clinton prohibited any member of his administration from representing foreign governments after leaving the federal government. (It is generally common practice for political appointees to work later for lobbying firms to capitalize on their connections.)