“I intend to speak the truth to you tonight. It’s not pleasant, and certainly for me…It’s very painful. However, it is my hope, my prayer, that by being here tonight, I can open the door, provide you with a tiny glimpse of the tortured and of our moral and Christian responsibilities, to not only oppose, but to prevent torture.”
Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun, traveled to Guatemala in 1987 in order to teach children literacy, living in a more natural way and setting. For example, she enjoyed “Washing clothes in the river.” Consequently, Guatemala was in a civil war, “One that the United States secretly funded,” she said. Massacres, death threats, and disappearances were commonplace.
In the late 1970s, when Carter’s human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its “dirty war” — tens of thousands of “disappearances,” tortures and murders – then -political commentator Reagan joshed that she should “walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them.
Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.
The death toll was staggering — an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political “disappearances” in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.
The government of Guatemala felt threatened by her educating the Mayan children; thus, they sent her death threats. Perhaps they knew that she knew the United States underRonald Reaganwas secretly funding the war, as she says in the video. Whatever the case, she remained feeling confident that her American citizenship and status as a nun would keep her safe from bodily harm. Contrary to those hopes, she was abducted on November 2nd, 1989 and taken to be tortured by Guatemalan forces whose “boss was an American.” They took her to a location blindfolded, then began torturing and raping her.
They burned her with cigarettes if she answered “incorrectly” to questions in a sick game. A doctor counted 111 burns on her back alone. She also said she was gang raped, and wouldn’t talk of it any further.
HORRIBLE TORTURE
The 35-year-old Roman Catholic nun had testified that she was
kidnapped by men in uniform from a convent in Antigua, about 30 miles
from Guatemala City. She said her captors beat and raped her, burned
her 111 times with cigarettes and lowered her into a pit filled with
human bodies and rats.
While pathological gratifications were the tortures’ ends, paramount was halting the development of literacy and intellectual development of the Mayan children, and who knows what else. Evil – she said the torture was evil. And the agony still breaths in her little frail frame of a body as she speaks of it in the video, while having spoken of the “moral and Christian responsibilities” to prevent and oppose torture – courageously.
To conclude, torture is un-American as well as immoral and evil. Tragically, Alyssa Peterson knew it was immoral, un-American, and evil in my opinion.
Why else would she take her own life rather than torture someone?
My answer is, she refused to wear the blindfold that the un-American, immoral, and evil sons-of-bitches tried to force her to wear.
The Blindfold’s Eyes is the searing memoir of Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was abducted and tortured in Guatemala. Her ongoing search for healing and justice offers proof that at the core of the human spirit there is a force stronger than violence and fear.
