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Copyright © 2003
Orbis Books
September 2002
Memoir by Sister Dianna Ortiz Portrays
Psychological and Spiritual Impact of Torture
“...an important book....impossible to dismiss...” Publishers Weekly
After the September 11 attacks, the possibility of using torture against suspected terrorists became a part of the national debate, and was widely endorsed (in some surprising quarters, including by staunch civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz). Sister Dianna Ortiz, a survivor of torture in Guatemala, has written a memoir of her experience to illustrate the reality of this practice. “The damage torture does can never be undone. If I survived for any reason, it is to say that,” she writes in The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth (written with Patricia Davis, Orbis Books, $25.00, October 2002).
“No one ever fully recovers—not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures. Every time he tortures, the torturer reinforces the idea that we cannot trust one another, and that we cannot trust the world we live in,” says Sister Ortiz, an Ursuline nun who now directs the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC) in Washington, DC.

The risk of allowing torture to be used—ever, for any reason—is that it doesn’t go away. It becomes an accepted part of society, as it has in Guatemala, Sister Ortiz documents. Though the civil war ended years ago and there are no more guerrillas, the death squads still operate. Violence against unionists, human rights workers, youth leaders, educators, religious workers, political leaders and academics has reached levels not seen since the 1980s. Recent cases include the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi, bludgeoned to death two days after he released the Catholic Church’s four-volume analysis of the human rights violations.
Of the estimated 47,000 people “disappeared” in Guatemala over the last several decades, Sister Ortiz is one of few to make it out alive. Her case attracted international attention because of the explosive charge that a man who intervened with her captors—a mysterious “Alejandro”—may have had connections with the U.S. Embassy. Sister Ortiz has fought to uncover the truth in the face of official stonewalling, attempts to discredit her, and outright slander. Guatemalan officials called her abduction a “self-kidnapping” and a “hoax” perpetrated while she snuck out to meet a “lesbian lover.”

Sister Ortiz’s ordeal began in November, 1989, when she was abducted by security forces while working as a missionary among indigenous people in Guatemala. She was taken to a secret prison in the capital center and brutally tortured. For twenty-four hours, she was gang-raped, burned with cigarettes, and suspended over a pit filled with the bodies of men, women and children who had been murdered. Her captors murdered a woman in front of her, and forced her to put her hand around the knife they used as they plunged it in—and videotaped it in order to blackmail her.
After her release, her struggle to heal was fraught with excruciating pain and spiritual crisis, including severe memory loss (she remembered nothing before the abduction, not even her family), nightmares, broken relationships with friends and members of her religious community, thoughts of suicide, and loss of faith.

In the years since, Sister Ortiz has spoken out against torture by filing lawsuits, giving interviews, testifying at length before investigators of six agencies, and holding vigils. She honors a vow she made to tell the world about the others who were not lucky enough to have politicians and journalists outraged about their disappearance: “I have to let the people who were being tortured beside me know that I haven’t forgotten them,” she says. “As long as I’m alive, I have to use my life to work against the practice of torture.”

Speaking out, and reliving her experiences at the hands of her torturers is so painful for Sister Ortiz, that only now, years later, has she been able to write a book about it. “I wasn’t ready emotionally,” she says. “The process of reviewing my life and examining how the torture changed it has been wrenching.”

Sister Ortiz offers an unforgettable portrait of the psychological and spiritual impact of torture. Her story is also one of faith, friendship, and the quest to prove that at the core of the human spirit there is a force stronger than violence and more powerful than fear.

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