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</div><div>Sister Dianna Ortiz—US nun who survived Guatemala torture and became human rights champion—dies at 62</div><div>
</div><div> Common Dreams February 22, 2021</div><div> </div><div><b>Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico whose 1989 abduction, rape, and torture by U.S.-backed Guatemalan forces led to her becoming an outspoken peace, human rights, and anti-torture activist,</b> died Friday in Washington, D.C. at the age of 62 after battling cancer.Ortiz—who wanted to be a nun since she was a little girl—joined the Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph, part of a 400-year-old Roman Catholic order dedicated to the education of girls and the care of the sick and needy, when she was still a teenager. She taught kindergarten for a decade before moving to Guatemala in 1987 at the age of 28.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Years later Ortiz explained that she wanted "to teach young indigenous children to read and write... and to understand the Bible in their culture."</b></div><div>
</div><div>It was dangerous work at a dangerous time. Guatemala was ravaged by decades of civil war that followed a 1954 CIA coup deposing Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically-elected progressive president. U.S.-backed right-wing military dictatorships, some of which perpetrated genocidal violence against the country's Mayan population, followed.</div><div>
</div><div><b>The 36-year civil war left over 200,000 Guatemalans dead, more than 600 villages destroyed, and countless people—mostly Mayan campesinos—displaced.</b></div><div>
</div><div>"Every family in San Miguel had people who had been tortured, disappeared, or killed," Mary Elizabeth Ballard, an Ursuline sister who had arrived in Guatemala a year before Ortiz, told the literary magazine Agni in a 1998 interview. "No family was untouched."</div><div>
</div><div>By early 1989 Ortiz was receiving threatening letters imploring her to leave Guatemala. She eventually did depart, traveling to the Urusline motherhouse in Kentucky. But only for a short while.</div><div>
</div><div>"She had a great love for the Guatemalans," explained Luisa Bickett, another Ursuline sister who worked in San Miguel.</div><div>
</div><div>"I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.'"</div><div>—Ortiz</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz returned to Guatemala in September 1989. By the following month, she was receiving death threats. For her safety, Ortiz decided to seek refuge at Posada de Belén, a convent and religious retreat 170 miles (270 km) from San Miguel in Antigua.</div><div>
</div><div>On November 2, Ortiz was reading in the convent's garden when her life was forever changed. In an interview with Kerry Kennedy, she recalled that:</div><div>
</div><div>I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.' I turned to see the morning sunlight glinting off a gun held by a man who had threatened me once before on the street. <b>He and his partner forced me onto a bus, then into a police car</b> where they blindfolded me.</div><div>We came to a building and they led me down some stairs. They left me in a dark cell, where I listened to the cries of a man and woman being tortured. When the men returned, they <b>accused me of being a guerrilla and began interrogating me. For every answer I gave them, they burned my back or my chest with cigarettes. Afterwards, they gang-raped me repeatedly.</b></div><div><b>Ortiz was then moved to another room with another woman prisoner. Some men returned with a video camera and a machete, which Ortiz thought would be used to torture her. Instead, she says she was forced to kill the other woman.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"What I remember is blood gushing, spurting like a water fountain... and my cries lost in the cries of the woman," she recalled. Her captors then threatened to release video of her attacking the woman if she refused to cooperate. Then:</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">I was lowered into a pit full of bodies—bodies of children, men, and women, some decapitated, all caked with blood. A few were still alive. I could hear them moaning... A stench of decay rose from the pits. Rats swarmed over the bodies... I passed out and when I came to I was lying on the ground beside the pit, rats all over me.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Ortiz said that a North American man her torturers called "Alejandro" was present during her ordeal. When he realized she was an American, he helped her get dressed and drove her away while apologizing. "He said he was... working to liberate [Guatemala] from communism," Ortiz recalled.</span></div><div>
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</div><div>Darleen Chmielewski, a Franciscan nun who was one of the first people to see Ortiz after her escape, described her friend as in "a state of shock." The two women went to the home of the the Vatican representative in Guatemala City, who had offered Ortiz refuge.</div><div>
</div><div>"Diana wanted to take a bath," Chmielewski recalled. "I helped her wash and saw all the cigarette burns... she just cried and took baths."</div><div>
</div><div>Two days later, Ortiz was back in the United States. "After escaping from my torturers, I returned home to New Mexico so traumatized that I recognized no one, not even my parents," she told Kennedy. <b>"I had virtually no memory of my life before my abduction; the only piece of my identity that remained was that I was a woman who was raped and forced to torture and murder another human being."</b></div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz also felt forced to do something unimaginable for many nuns. "I got pregnant as a result of the multiple gang rapes," she told Kennedy. "Unable to carry within me... what I could only view as a monster, I turned to someone for assistance and I destroyed that life."</div><div>
</div><div>"I felt I had no choice," explained Ortiz. "If I had had to grow within me what the torturers left me I would have died."</div><div>
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</div><div><b>Ortiz's torment continued as she sought—and was denied—justice. U.S. embassy officials accused her of staging her abduction in a bid to thwart the <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">George H.W. Bush administration's military aid to Guatemala</span>. Cigarette burns—111 of them, according to a U.S. doctor who examined her—told a different story.</b></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads—my torturers themselves."</b></div><div><b>—Ortiz</b></div><div>
</div><div><b>In a bizarre twist, Guatemalan officials claimed Ortiz faked her kidnapping to cover up a violent lesbian affair, a rumor subsequently spread by U.S. officials</b>. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Previously, the Reagan administration had undertaken a similar effort to discredit another Ursuline nun, Dorothy Kazel of Cleveland, Ohio, who along with three other American churchwomen was kidnapped, raped, and executed in El Salvador by U.S.-backed troops in 1980.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>Even though she was back in the relative safety of the United States, Ortiz received menacing phone calls and anonymous packages, one containing a dead mouse wrapped in a Guatemalan flag. However, undaunted, she made three trips to Guatemala to testify against the government there.</b></div><div>
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</div><div><b>Ortiz tasted victory, albeit of a largely symbolic nature, in April 1995, when a federal judge in Boston ordered Gen. Héctor Gramajo, the Guatemalan defense minister who had tried to discredit Ortiz, to pay her and eight other torture victims a combined $47.5 million.</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In 1996 Ortiz held a five-week fasting vigil in front of the White House, where she demanded that the U.S. government declassify all documents about human rights abuses in Guatemala since the 1954 coup. Hillary Clinton, then first lady, invited Ortiz to her office. During their meeting, Clinton did not rule out the possibility that "Alejandro" was a past or current U.S. operative.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz's relentless pursuit of justice eventually compelled the United States to declassify long-secret documents revealing details of U.S. cooperation with Guatemalan security forces before, during, and after the time of her abduction, including an admission that the U.S. embassy was in contact with members of a death squad.</div><div>
</div><div><b>The documents also showed that Gen. Gramajo had been trained in counterinsurgency tactics at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA)</b>, where military and police officials from Latin American allies—many of them dictatorships—were instructed in counterinsurgency and democracy suppression using course manuals that advocated the torture and execution of civilians.</div><div>
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</div><div><b>The files also proved that the U.S. was supporting Guatemalan forces guilty of perpetrating genocide. In 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. role in the bloodshed, terror, and repression.</b></div><div>
</div><div>"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads—my torturers themselves," Ortiz later wrote. "The United States was the Guatemalan army's partner in a covert war against a small opposition force, a war the United Nations would later declare genocidal."</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz's suffering left her with an acute awareness of human rights issues and a desire to work in service of those rights. In 1998 she founded Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), and in 2002 published The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. In the 2000s Ortiz was a vocal opponent of the George W. Bush's torture program in the so-called War on Terror.</div><div>
</div><div>Last year, she was named deputy director of Pax Christi USA, part of an international Catholic peace movement.</div><div>
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</div><div>Recently, Ortiz worked for nuclear disarmament and led Pax Christi's work commemorating the 75th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.</div><div>
</div><div>As for her recovery, Ortiz wrote in The Blindfold's Eyes that despite years of therapy at Chicago's Marjorie Kovler Center for torture survivors, "no one ever fully recovers" from torture, "not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz never not stopped searching for the whole truth of what happened to her back in 1989.</div><div>
</div><div>"No one ever fully recovers, not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."</div><div>—Ortiz</div><div>
</div><div>"I demand the right to a future built on truth and justice," she told Kennedy. "My torturers were never brought to justice. It is possible that, individually, they will never be identified or apprehended. But I cannot resign myself to this fact and move on. I have a responsibility to the people of Guatemala and to the people of the world to insist on accountability where it is possible."</div><div>
</div><div>"I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth," said Ortiz. "I am still waiting."</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Ursuline Sister Larraine Lauter was with Ortiz when she passed away on Friday. Lauter called her friend "unfailingly good."</div><div>
</div><div>"Dianna walked through the very worst of hell and came out with love," she told the Catholic Standard. "It's hard to believe that bad things happen to good nuns, but they do. Her legacy is for us to be nonviolent. Her legacy is a witness to nonviolence and to love in the face of evil and to redemption. That's her legacy, to teach us that that's possible."</div><div>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="http://soaw.org/news/organizing-updates/4337-exposed-fbi-surveillance-of-school-of-the-americas-watch" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">http://soaw.org/news/organizing-updates/4337-exposed-fbi-surveillance-of-school-of-the-americas-watch</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><table class="contentpaneopen" style="border: none; border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); width: 691px;"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>Exposed: FBI Surveillance of School of the Americas Watch
</strong>
<em>by</em> Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund
</font><p style="margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>FBI used counter-terrorism authority to track pacifist human rights group for 10 years</strong>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">For a decade, the FBI flagrantly abused its counter-terrorism authority to conduct a widespread surveillance and monitoring operation of School of Americas Watch (SOAW),</span> a nonviolent activist organization founded by pacifists with the aim of closing the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (now renamed) and ending the U.S. role in the militarization of Latin America.
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><a href="http://soaw.org/november/vigil-news-room/overview-of-fbi-documents-on-soaw" style="">Hundreds of pages of documents</a> obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, on behalf of SOAW, once again reveal the FBI’s functioning as a political surveillance and intelligence operation and its use of its domestic terrorism authority against peaceful protest in the United States.</span>
SOAW organizes annual protests in Fort Benning, Ga., the site where the U.S. Army has trained many of the military leaders and dictators in Latin America who were responsible for massacres of opposition forces and the creation of torture centers, among other crimes against humanity. The training at the SOA is ongoing and the graduates of the institute continue to engage in extrajudicial executions and the repression of social movements in countries like Chile, Colombia, Honduras and Mexico.
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">SOAW’s mission and proven track record are peaceful. Yet the FBI deployed its “domestic terrorism” resources, reported to the “Counterterrorism Unit” and reached out to the Miami Domestic Intelligence Terrorism Squad</span>. It used confidential informants inside the movement to collect information. The FBI’s headquarters and counter-terrorism units were requested to provide the FBI’s Field Office in Atlanta with “all intelligence relevant to the SOA, so that this information can be provided to local/military law enforcement agencies.”
<strong>
Tracked despite 'peaceful intentions'</strong>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A review of 10 years of redacted documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund on behalf of the SOAW show that, year after year, the FBI acknowledged that the organizers and the activities of the group were peaceful. And year after year, the FBI continued to keep its case open with claims that it was possible that there could be “more aggressive protest participants” or “factions of a radical cell” or other such pretextual alarmist warnings to justify its spying on protected First Amendment political activity.</span>
The documents have been made public and are searchable at <a href="http://justiceonline.org/soaw" style="">http://www.justiceonline.org/soaw</a>.
In 2005, FBI reports admitted “the peaceful intentions” of the SOA Watch leaders but justified its work on the basis that “a militant group would infiltrate the protestors and use of the cover of the crowd to create problems.” Yet they admitted that “At this time, there are no specific or known threats to this event.”
The vague, unspecified threat of future violence functioned as the annual excuse for the surveillance of peaceful dissent. Under this logic of counter-terrorism law enforcement activity, all constitutionally protected peaceful protest carries the seed of potential terrorism — we are all potential terrorists.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This pattern of significant surveillance, allusions to violence and then reports of peaceful activity after the fact continued for years.
<strong>Mass arrests and Confidential Informants</strong>
The protests for many years involved thousands of people, and included arrests for peaceful, organized, nonviolent civil disobedience. Law enforcement described the mass arrests of 1,700 protesters in November 2000 as arrests for “acting in an overt manner.” This included “wearing masks, coffins, puppets or pouring the red substance upon themselves."
In <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">2006, Confidential Informants provided information about planning events in Massachusetts, and the numbers of buses coming from around the country. The FBI obtained shelters and command centers "at no cost" from real estate companies to work on logistics for the protest, which was again labeled an FBI “Special Events Readiness Level.” Later they reviewed the 2006 protest as “uneventful” and came to a similar assessment for 2007.</span>
In 2008, undercover FBI agents traveled with protesters to the event to follow the activities of several “subjects of FBI-Minneapolis” although they had “never expressed or exhibited a propensity for violence.”
The FBI used Confidential Informants who dutifully reported on the planned schedule of activities for the protests, the names of organizers, including a person “who is or was a <b>Maryknoll nun,”</b> and the name of a legal advisor to SOAW. The legal advisor, whose name was redacted but is otherwise identified with Loyola University, is evidently renowned human rights lawyer Bill Quigley.
By 2009, after 10 years of surveillance, the FBI admitted “there has never been any significant incidents of violence or widespread property damage.” Describing the demonstrations more as a “street festival,” they finally closed the case.
<strong>FBI's operating practice of political surveillance</strong>
In <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">2012, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund uncovered hundreds of documents exposing that <a href="http://justiceonline.org/fbi_files_ows" style="">the FBI was treating the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat</a> even though the agency similarly acknowledged in its own reports that organizers explicitly called for peaceful protest and did “not condone the use of violence.”</span>
The <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">PCJF obtained heavily redacted documents showing that<b> FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park </b>and other Occupy actions around the country. </span>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Other documents obtained and released by the PCJF demonstrated that the Department of Homeland Security and the <a href="http://www.bigbrotheramerica.org/report" style="">sprawling network of Fusion Centers in the United States similarly expended huge resources</a> monitoring, tracking and reporting on peaceful, lawful and constitutionally protected protest activities.</span>
The FBI has recently been further exposed as monitoring and tracking, including through surveillance aircraft, the activities of the Black Lives Matter movement in cities around the United States.
<strong>Unlearned lessons and unfinished work of the Church Committee</strong>
In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee of the United States Senate conducted an investigation into U.S. intelligence agencies’ abuse of law enforcement authority to target First Amendment activity and peaceful organizing through investigations, surveillance and disruption. As a result of the disclosures of the Committee, the FBI was required to enact restrictions on the use of its intelligence and law enforcement powers, prohibiting investigations into non-violent free speech activities. While Congress could have enacted binding legislation, the U.S. Attorney General was allowed to promulgate guidelines instead — guidelines that have been watered down by successive administrations over the past 40 years.
These repeated revelations of the FBI unconscionably abusing its counter-terrorism authority against peaceful political movements — from SOAW to Occupy to Black Lives Matter — make it clear that the FBI cannot be its own watchdog or self-regulate. It makes it clear that surveillance, monitoring, tracking and infiltration of peaceful social justice movements is a programmatic, institutionalized and ongoing effort of the FBI. It is time for there to be legislatively enacted prohibitions on the FBI’s use of domestic terrorism authority against peaceful protest and First Amendment-protected free speech activities in the United States.
It is a fundamental right of the people to organize, to assemble, to speak and to peacefully demand change in U.S. policies and practices — without monitoring and investigation from the government’s domestic terrorism agencies. Democracy and the Constitution require no less.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Converge on Fort Benning from November 20-22</font></strong></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px;"><img src="https://org.salsalabs.com/o/727/images/procession-1.jpg" align="left" /><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SOAW activists from across the Americas are not intimidated, and will once again <a href="http://soaw.org/november" style="">take a stand at Fort Benning, Georgia, from November 20-22</a> to speak out against repressive U.S. policies, and to engage in nonviolent direct action. The SOAW Legal Collective will provide legal support and monitor police activities, to ensure that the family-friendly, permitted demonstrations will be safe for everyone.</font></p></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></div></div></div></div>