Remembering Sister Dianna Ortiz, Survivor And Advocate Against Torture
“The miracle of my life is that out of unspeakable horror came a new mission in life.”
Maria Martin, an independent journalist based in Guatemala, offers this remembrance of the late Sister Dianna Ortiz, a remarkable woman who used her horrific experience as a torture survivor in Guatemala in the 1980s to fight for human rights and educate about the use of torture globally — even while suffering the trauma of her experience until her death in February 2021.
(REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK) I first met Sister Dianna Ortiz more than 20 years ago — on a wintry Thanksgiving weekend in 1998 at the Cleveland Airport. She looked like a young Virgin of Guadalupe — slight and brown — sitting in a white plastic chair in an airport waiting area, in those pre-9/11 days when visitors were allowed past security.
I was then completing a Kiplinger Journalism Fellowship at Ohio State University and had decided that for my master’s project in investigative journalism, I would follow up on the story of what had happened to the Ursuline missionary 10 years earlier in Guatemala.
I had driven north from Columbus to Cleveland during a snowstorm to meet the young nun who had been kidnapped, raped and tortured by the Guatemalan military in November 1989. Ortiz was one of only a handful of Americans to face — and then barely survive — the violence that the government of that country inflicted daily on many of its citizens.
Moreover, Ortiz claimed a man appearing to be an American was in her torture chamber, and for much of the last 10 years since her horrific experience, she had sought justice and truth from the U.S. and Guatemalan governments — only to be left feeling betrayed by both.
Because of this, tracking Ortiz down wasn’t easy. Through a colleague, I contacted the director of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission USA, Alice Zachmann. Zachmann let me know that Ortiz — now her colleague at GHRC-USA — was a very private person and was not granting media interviews. However, Zachmann was gracious enough to let me know that they both would be at the Cleveland airport that night, and that would be my chance to convince the reclusive then 40-year-old Ortiz to speak to me.
The first interview
After preliminary greetings, I started to tell Dianna that I couldn’t even pretend to understand what she’s gone through — that once, about five years earlier, someone had broken into a motel room where I was spending the night. The intruder had a knife and tried to rape me, but I fought him off, and he finally fled. That experience had only lasted a few minutes, but it came back to haunt me. I told Dianna I couldn’t even begin to fathom what she must still be going through after 24 hours of unspeakable torture.
Whatever the reason, she agreed to speak with me — even though, as she wrote me later, she wasn’t sure if she could trust me and watched me “like a hawk.”
Eventually, Dianna came to trust me, and out of those interviews came two award-winning audio documentaries: “The Betrayal of Sister Dianna Ortiz” and “Surviving Torture: The Search for Healing.” Producing them touched my life in profound ways. I also believe they may have played a small part in Dianna’s healing process.
As the years passed, we were only in touch sporadically. When, in 2019, I was assigned to profile Dianna for a project on “Spiritual Exemplars” being produced by the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, she again agreed to be interviewed. We spoke on the phone a couple of times, when she let me know she was experiencing health challenges and wanted to postpone our face-to-face interviews. Then the pandemic hit. Not long after, I learned she had passed. Now, almost a year later, I want to share the story of the remarkable Sister Dianna Ortiz.
Becoming a nun
Dianna Mae Ortiz was born in 1958 to a working-class family in southern Colorado. Her father worked the uranium mines of New Mexico while her mother stayed home to raise eight children.
Since she was little, the sensitive Dianna spoke about wanting to become a nun. She entered the Ursuline order at 17 and trained to teach small children.
Her desire to be a missionary in Latin America brought her to an Indigenous Maya village in Guatemala while the country was still in the throes of a bloody civil conflict that was to take more than 200,000 lives before ending in 1996.
People who knew her told me she came across as fragile but was very strong and spiritual.
Dianna herself stated, “The miracle of my life is that out of unspeakable horror came a new mission in life.”
Some years into her stay in the country, in November 1989, she was kidnapped and tortured by the Guatemalan military. According to medical records, her back was burned with cigarettes 111 times; she was gang raped and dropped into a pit with rats and human bodies. She was even forced to participate in the murder of another woman in the torture chamber, according to her 2002 memoir.
In 1999, on the 10th anniversary of the ordeal that was to mark her life, I traveled to Guatemala to investigate why she had been abducted. What I discovered was that Dianna had taken an active role in advocating at the local military office to stop the forceable recruitment of young Indigenous men in the community where she was stationed — San Miguel Acatan, in the province of Huehuetenango.
“We remember … she started the youth ministry and helped the young people a lot during the time of the violence,” the church’s sacristan, Chico Martin, told me. “She supported the young men who were forcibly recruited into the army.”
After 20 years of living in Guatemala, I still hold to the theory that in attempting to work with the poor and Indigenous, the brown-skinned Mexican-American Dianna came up against the racist, misogynistic power structure that continues to control Guatemala to this day.
At the time of her release from torture and military custody, Ortiz had been told her imprisonment had been a case of mistaken identity — that the real target had been a guerrilla leader named Veronica Ortiz Hernandez, who looked nothing like her.
For years, Ortiz attempted to get to the truth of her kidnapping and torture — all the while encountering resistance and even attempts to smear her from the both the Guatemalan and U.S. governments. Upon her release, Ortiz had said a man appearing to be an American had been in her torture chamber. For this, she recalled in testimony during a 2002 human rights trial, “I was labeled a liar, a crazy woman ... a political strategist who was trying to get Congress to cut off U.S. aid to the Guatemalan military.”
A test of faith
Dianna’s ordeal not only left her body and mind wounded but also tested her faith: “If God were so interested in me, then why the burnings, the gang rapes and all the other horrors?” she asked.
Healing for Dianna, as for most survivors of torture, was a very long process — as was regaining her faith. For many years, she struggled with trauma, pain and questions: “How was I to go on living when my life had been destroyed?” she asked, stating she “yearn(ed) to be free” of memories and fear.
“But torture’s ghost walks with us every single day of our lives,” she said, “reminding us that the past is not gone, that the past will always be, and without a moment's warning ... can trigger a memory for us.”
Her healing “involved a lot rebuilding,” said her friend Pat Davis, who is also the co-author of Ortiz’s memoir, “The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth.” Ortiz had to “rebuild a sense of what God is … and how it is that God can allow these horrible things to happen. “
As part of her healing, Dianna learned a lesson from the parable of Jesus and the loaves and fishes. “Jesus accepted what there was, five loaves of bread and two fishes offered by a boy,” she said. “He didn't complain or despair. He gave thanks to God for them, however insufficient they seemed. And he started passing them out.”
For the wounded nun, this Biblical passage contained a message to guide her life: “Take what you have in an attitude of faith … and it will be enough. … It will be more than enough.”
Gradually, Ortiz, whose memory was obliterated by her torture, came to understand that, as the Roman Catholic author Graham Greene wrote, “Life is absurd, therefore there is always hope.”
Ortiz also learned much about the power of community during her stay at the Marjorie Kovler Center for Survivors of Torture in Chicago — especially through interactions with people who’d suffered similar horrific experiences. “As time passed,” she recalled, “I forgave God for not working some dramatic miracle undoing my past. I learned that God was indeed working a quiet unobtrusive miracle, healing me through other people — through small gestures, smiles, hugs and kind words. What we had to offer each other in that house in Chicago had begun to counteract the power of the torturers’ smirks and punches.”
Her friend Pat Davis recalled, “I don't think she completely healed, but she ended up being a much more whole human being than many people who haven't been through this. … The pain didn’t go away, the memories didn’t go away, she never regained who she had been before the torture, but she became another beautiful, loving creature.”
Moreover, Ortiz used the moral perspective informed by her terrible ordeal to guide her spiritual and social justice vocation for the rest of her life through her work with the Guatemala Human Rights Commission USA and other human rights groups — like Pax Christi — and especially as the founder of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition, the only U.S. organization founded by and for survivors of torture.
Davis said Dianna was always aware of her privilege as a U.S. citizen, “that even in (Guatemala), she could leave because she had a U.S. passport — other people did not have that luxury. … Her faith was to walk with the people and with the poor”
Dianna herself expressed her commitment to her work with survivors of torture in this way:
It's very important that you understand that each time I speak out, it’s not about an American nun who was tortured. ... It is about every mother whose son or daughter is disappeared. It’s about every person who has been tortured physically, emotionally, sexually. … It's about working collectively to try to prevent one more person from being tortured.
Leaving behind a legacy
Ortiz died of cancer on the wintry Friday of Feb. 19, 2021, at the Assisi community in Washington, D.C., that she had been a part of for years. They said the snow she loved started just after she took her last breath.
“She could have been a very bitter woman … and not done anything and just felt sorry for (herself),” said her friend and colleague, the tireless 95-year old Alice Zachmann, now at the School Sisters of Notre Dame, “but she did the exact opposite of what someone would do … in her situation, and I’m so happy she’s at peace now.”
Zachmann added, “Now we don’t pray for Dianna — we pray to Dianna. … I think she’s already a declared saint … and many other people have said the same thing.”
For so many, myself included, the spirit and lessons of Dianna remain vibrant. In one of her speeches, she declared:
I pray that God's plan for you is as clear as God's plan has come to me. And that … God's plan for you, will rest on this credo: “Thou shall not be a victim. Thou shall not be a perpetrator — and above all, thou shall not be a bystander.”
Dianna Ortiz, presente!
A version of this essay was produced as an audio documentary for a project of The Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California: “Spiritual Exemplars: A Global Project in Engaged Spirituality” is supported by the John Templeton Foundation and the Templeton Religion Trust. For more information, please visit http://crcc.usc.edu/sep.
Maria Martin, an award-winning public radio journalist for over three decades, developed pioneering programs for public radio, including Latino USA and Despues de las Guerras: Central America After the Wars.
She currently directs the GraciaVida Center for Media, a nonprofit based in Guatemala and Texas and devoted to the practice of independent journalism in the public interest.
In September of 2015, Martin was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Her journalistic memoir “Crossing Borders, Building Bridges: A Journalist’s Heart in Latin America,” was published in 2020 by Conocimientos Press.