Dianna Ortiz joins vigil for torture victims

National Catholic Reporter, July 17, 1998 by Arthur Jones

WASHINGTON -- The heat index was 106 degrees as the small group set up its table in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House preparing for a June 26 dawn-to-dusk candlelight vigil.

Among the people wearing the white "Help Stop Torture" T-shirts was Ursuline Sr. Dianna Ortiz who, during Congressional testimony two days earlier, broke down as she recounted how she had become pregnant as a result of being brutalized and raped by Guatemalan security forces and had had an abortion.

The nearby White House was unoccupied -- President Clinton was in Beijing where, finally, he had decided to speak out on China's human rights abuses.

The gathering in Lafayette Park -- sponsored by the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Committee that was culminating three days of Washington meetings and testimony -- had similar concerns. The Support Committee estimates the United States is home to more than 400,000 torture survivors.

Before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus June 24, torture victims from the 1980s and '90s described what they underwent in locations ranging from Turkey to Nigeria, from Iraq to the Philippines, from Columbia to Pakistan, from Tibet to Guatemala (see accompanying story).

Ortiz told the caucus, "For the last nine years I have tried to stop running. I have tried to face the torturers head on and demand answers, demand justice. Instead of forgiving my torturers, I filed suit against the Guatemalan government and called for an investigation."

She said the Guatemala investigation "led nowhere;" that her five-week vigil in front of the White House seeking declassification of documents that could reveal the identities of her torturers had failed; that U.S. government investigations produced nothing; that Department of Justice investigators accused her of lying; and that Guatemalan and U.S. government officials, "in public and private, said I was a lesbian who had sneaked out for a tryst, [that] the 111 cigarette burns on my back were the result of kinky sex."

Ortiz said that because she could no longer subject herself to the "retraumatization" brought on by justice department investigators' questions and manner, the department had closed her case.

One of the people who saw the Department of Justice report, said Ortiz, was Thomas Strouck, U.S. ambassador to Guatemala at the time of her 1989 abduction, "who before any member of the U.S. Embassy had interviewed me, said `Her story is not accurate,' and told the State Department that my motives were questionable."

Strouck later discussed the report with a journalist, Ortiz testified, "who then called me. There are things in that report. I have kept secret that I have been ashamed of -- things I did not tell DOJ investigators but that my friends revealed as they were being interrogated -- and I have lived under tacit blackmail."

"Let me simply tell you," she told the panel, "I got pregnant as a result of the multiple gang rapes by my torturers, and unable to carry within me what they had engendered, what I could view only as a monster, the product of the men who had raped me, I turned to someone for assistance and destroyed that life."

Ortiz was unable to continue, the rest of her testimony was read for her: "If I had to make the decision again, I believe I would again decide as I did eight years ago. I had little choice. My survival was so precarious at that time that to have to grow within me what the torturers had left me would have killed me. I tell you this simply so that I can proceed with the truth."

Ortiz has since filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the Department of Justice report.

RELATED ARTICLE: Survivors recall brutality, pain

WASHINGTON -- Throughout the hot, muggy night in Lafayette Park, the numbers of people on hand supporting the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Committee fluctuated between about 35 and 100. "The mood was somber," said Sr. Alice Zachmann of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission, "and the people quiet."

Among the torture victims present, in addition to Sr. Dianna Ortiz, were Columbian journalist Richard Valez and the Kurdish survivor of Turkish brutality, Mehdi Zana.

Valez, who several years ago uncovered details of Columbian military brutality, was subsequently arrested by that military and himself tortured.

Zana was mayor of Diyarbakir in Turkish Kurdistan in 1980 when there was a military coup. He and dozens of other Kurds were jailed. All were tortured, many crippled for life; 54 died, including four who deliberately set themselves afire in protest. Police batons were forced into the naked Kurds' anuses and they were made to parade as "Kurds with Tails."

Zana spent 11 years in jail. His chronicle of the ordeal, Prison #5, is banned in Turkey. When, earlier this month, the Copenhagen-based International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims opened a Diyarbakir office, Turkish authorities closed it after five days.

Tibetan Ani Pachen was among torture survivors who gave testimony before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus June 24 and returned home before the vigil. Captured during late 1950s fighting as China invaded Tibet, she was brutally tortured and released by China in 1981 after 21 years in captivity.