Nun seeks identity of American torturer: he was 'a fellow American who exhibited authority over my captors.'

National Catholic Reporter, March 29, 1996 by Arthur Jones

WASHINGTON -- At 3 p.m. on Palm Sunday, the day the Christ's Passion is read in Catholic churches, a slight figure in street clothes intends to begin a silent vigil outside the White House.

The "passion," the suffering, of Ursuline Sr. Diana Mae Ortiz began on Nov. 2, 1989, in a clandestine Guatemala City prison where she was repeatedly brutalized, raped and tortured.

As Ortiz, a youthful, elfin, dark-haired woman in her 30s, takes her place at the White House railings March 31, she will remember images of the tortured women she saw alive and dead in the prison; as she stands on that Washington sidewalk, her ears will echo Guatemalan screams the onlookers cannot hear.

From a recent NCR interview, earlier congressional testimony and previous stories, the harrowing account emerges. Abducted from the yard of a church retreat house six and a half years ago, she was taken in a Guatemalan National Police car to a Guatemala City building, the Old Polytechnical Academy, which was serving as a clandestine jail.

Stripped, brutalized and repeatedly burned, at one point she was lowered into an open pit packed with human bodies -- children, women, men, some decapitated, some lying face up, some alive, some dead -- a pit swarming with rats.

At the same time, she could hear the screams of the tortured coming from other areas the prison. Later she was forced to watch a torture session.

By the time she was releasecd 30 hours later, she was physically and emotionally broken. Even now, although her healing progresses, she is haunted, taunted - -at times halted -- by the ordeal.

She will take up her vigil to demand that U.S. authorities declassify all U.S. government documents on Guatemalan human rights abuses, most specifically on her own case.

Hers is the cause, too, of thousands of other women worldwide, not least in Guatemala, who have suffered similar abuse at the hands of so-called "national security" forces, national police and the military.

Four times Ortiz has been back to Guatemala to assist with the investigation of her case. On occasion, she has been so traumatized by trying to relive the ordeal she has had to leave and return to the United States.

In Guatemala, where Ortiz has provided descriptions of three of the men involved and has identified the building in which she and others were tortured, the government has repeatedly obstructed investigation into her case,

In 1992, Guatemalan Special Prosecutor Fernando Linares suggested Ortiz and the Ursuline Sisters were trying to "hide something" because he had been unable to personally interview Ortiz in Guatemala.

One of Ortiz's lawyers, Paul Soreff of Louisville, Ky., said at that time that Linares had failed to respond to repeated invitations to interview Ortiz in the United States.

The other specter that looms over Ortiz is the equally invisible, equally pressing conviction that the U.S. government was also in attendance that day in the Guatemala jail.

She asks, "Who is Alejandro?" -- the American who presided at her torture. The U.S. government apparently is attempting to find out.

In March 1995, President Clinton ordered the Federal Intelligence Advisory Board to establish a four-member Intelligence Oversight Board to investigate the Ortiz case.

The oversight board's counsel, Frank Fountain, told NCR the investigation is "substantially complete. We are continuing to move forward in the review and hope to complete it as soon as practicable." Fountain said he could not say exactly when that would be. Asked if it would. be this year, he said, "I certainly hope so," and that only some pieces were needed to wrap it up.

There is word, too, of a grand jury investigation into Ortizs case and rumors that the grand jury is about to hand down. an indictment, presumably of "Alejandro." But the U.S. district attorney's office said only that grand jury sittings are never confirmed and grand jury topics not discussed.

Ortiz is adamant about her records being made public. Six months ago, in congressional testimony, she relived the brutalization ordered by Alejandro. He was, she said, "a fellow American who exhibited authority over my captors."

Ortiz's account of her humiliation was riveting testimony: "I anticipate," she said, "that the Guatemalan and U.S. governments may acuse me of changing my testimony; but as I have gained strength and courage, I am prepared to share aspects of my torture that before were too painful to bring to light. One of these is that my torturers forced me to commit some horrible acts, and they videotaped and photographed me committing these acts," she said.

Ortiz, who had worked in San Miguel Acatan, an indigenous mountain town, teaching literacy and Bible study to children, said the captors told her if she did not answer their questions, they would release this footage to the public and the press. "Since the day I escaped, I have been afraid that if I continued to struggle for justice, my torturers would distribute tribute those videotapes. I was afraid I would be held responsible, by people like you, for acts I was forced to commit," she said.