Dianna Ortiz

when a man with an American accent entered the room and said in English, "Shit." Then he said, in Spanish, to the torturers, "You idiots! Leave her alone. She’s a North American, and it’s all over the news." To Ortiz he said, "You have to forgive those guys, … they made a mistake.

According to a Salon reviewer of Ortiz's 2002 memoir, "federal investigators and State Department officials made an active effort to cover up her ordeal and to discredit her – understandably, as the United States is the major source of funding for the Guatemalan military."

During the 2000s, TASSC became involved in issues related to treatment of detainees at the US base of Guantanamo, where reports of torture had been made. In addition, TASSC tried to gain repeal of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, by which Congress authorized a system outside the US's existing civilian and military justice systems to prosecute detainees being held at Guantanamo. Congress approved this legislation after the US Supreme Court held that the George W. Bush administration's military commissions, set up only under executive branch authority, were unconstitutional.

Raul Molina Mejía in his article, "The Struggle against Impunity in Guatemala", Journal of Social Justice, vol. 26 (1999), describes Ortiz's abduction and treatment as an example of state-sponsored terrorism based on impunity. He writes: "impunity as concrete legal or 'de facto' actions taken by powerful sectors to prevent investigation or prosecution, such as amnesty laws, pardons, thwarting investigations, the hiding of documents, and tampering with legal samples were abundant in Guatemala." He also notes the unsolved killing of Michael Devine, the El Aguacate massacre, and the 1990 surge of killings at the National University of San Carlos. Mejía writes that the "political/psychological" aspect of this impunity, is "a dimension resulting from state terrorism, by which political options in a polity are restricted and controlled through the state's manipulation of fear."

In 1998 Ortiz founded the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), the only organization in the US founded by and for survivors of torture. It provides support particularly to survivors living in the US, as many refugees had come from nations in Central and South America where states had sponsored terrorism against citizens.

The Center for Constitutional Rights represented Ortiz in her civil case and before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, which found in 1997 that the State of Guatemala had violated numerous articles of the American Convention on Human Rights in regard to Ortiz. It recommended that the government complete its long-delayed investigation and that it provide compensation to Ortiz.

In 1996, as a result of protests by Ortiz and others, as well as revelations of unauthorized CIA funding of the Guatemala military, which had been prohibited by Congress in 1990, President Bill Clinton ordered the release of CIA papers associated with her case, and the declassification of decades of documents related to US relations with Guatemala. These showed that a Guatemala colonel paid by the CIA was implicated in the deaths of the American Michael Devine in 1990 and guerrilla leader Efraín Bámaca Velásquez in 1993. Congress closed down the CIA program. It also showed decades of United States support of Guatemala during its genocide of its rural indigenous people.

In a 1996 widely recounted interview with Ortiz on the TV news program Nightline, American journalist Cokie Roberts contested Ortiz's claim that an American was among her captors. Roberts implied that Ortiz was lying about the entire episode, despite the fact that Ortiz later won a lawsuit against a Guatemalan general she accused in the case. It was later revealed that Patton Boggs, the law firm of Roberts' brother Tom Boggs, was paid by the Guatemalan government to promote a more positive image of the regime, which was widely criticized internationally for human rights abuses.

In April 1996, Ortiz was fasting outside the White House and joined by other protesters; she was seeking a release of CIA papers related to her abduction and the US government's investigation. Her protests had been preceded by those of Jennifer Harbury and members of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission, seeking US action on learning the fates of many "disappeared" in the country. Harbury's husband Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, a Mayan guerrilla leader, had "disappeared" in 1992 and was presumed dead.

Numerous CIA papers were released in May 1996. While there was no confirmation of Ortiz's claim that an American national had been directly involved in her case, the papers revealed that a Guatemalan colonel on the CIA payroll ordered the 1990 killing of DeVine and the 1993 murder of Velásquez by a death squad.

As a result of revelations, Clinton ordered the United States Intelligence Oversight Board to conduct a year-long review of operations of the CIA in Guatemala. Its 1996 report included a review of Ortiz's case but reserved its conclusions:

According to an article on Pamela Brogan's report The Torturers' Lobby (1993), published by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), Guatemala was among several nations known to commit torture and human rights abuses and that had paid US lobbying firms high fees to help keep US funds going to it and "to gloss over its wretched human rights reputation." For instance, in 1991, the major lobbying firm of Patton, Boggs, & Blow in Washington, DC, was paid $220,000 by Guatemala. Based on the CPI report, Clinton prohibited any member of his administration from representing foreign governments after leaving the federal government. (It is generally common practice for political appointees to work later for lobbying firms to capitalize on their connections.)

Ortiz pursued her case in a Guatemala court and in a United States civil court. In the latter, she was the first to seek civil damages under the Torture Victim Protection Act passed in 1992. She filed a case against the Guatemalan Minister of Defense, General Héctor Gramajo, in power at the time of her abduction, arguing that he had command authority. In 1995 she was awarded $5 million in damages. She also filed a case with the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights.

Trying to enable victims' seeking justice after not being able to gain it in countries that used torture, Congress passed the Torture Victim Protection Act (1992). Ortiz was the first to file a suit under this law, arguing that it was retroactive to the time of her torture. The court agreed, saying that "torture had been universally condemned prior to Ortiz's ordeal."

In June 1990, Michael Devine, an American innkeeper who had been living and working in Guatemala for 20 years, was found killed. The US pressed the Guatemalan government to solve his murder; when that did not happen by the end of the year, Congress prohibited more military funding, then worth about $2.8 million..

Richard Nuccio, a State Department analyst, told a Congressional contact that the CIA had been funding Guatemala military operations, despite the 1990 prohibition. As a result, Clinton ordered declassification of records going back to 1954 (when a CIA-sponsored military coup overthrew the government). Analysis has revealed longstanding US support for the Guatemala military through its years of state terrorism and civil war.

Sister Dianna filed a case with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1990 based on her abduction and torture by agents of the Guatemalan government in 1989. The commission ruled in 1997 that the state of Guatemala had violated Articles 1, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 16 and 25 of the American Convention on Human Rights. It found that Ortiz had been placed under surveillance, was threatened, then kidnapped and tortured. It made a judgment against the state of Guatemala, with remedies suggested. It noted that a domestic case had quickly been filed with the National Police in the department where the sisters were working, and that Ortiz had cooperated with the investigation, but in six years the government had made no progress on it. The commission noted that high-ranking officials of the National Police, Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense had immediately denied Ortiz's statement and tried to denigrate her account before any investigation was done.

Ortiz was abducted on November 2, 1989, from the garden of Posada de Belen. She said her captors were police officers who took her to a secret prison at a police academy (later identified as the Antigua Escuela Politécnica) in Guatemala City. There she was tortured and raped repeatedly under questioning.

The nightmare I lived was nothing out of the ordinary. In 1989, under Guatemala’s first civilian president in years, nearly two hundred people were abducted. Unlike me, they were "disappeared, gone forever". The only uncommon element of my ordeal was that I survived, probably because I was a U.S. citizen, and phone calls poured into Congress when I was reported missing. As a U.S. citizen, I had another advantage: I could, in relative safety, reveal afterwards the details of what happened to me in those twenty-four hours. One of those details: an American was in charge of my torturers.

Former US ambassador to Guatemala Thomas F. Stroock (1989–1992) said in 1995 that Ortiz's claims amounted to an allegation of US involvement in her torture, which he denied. He said it was done by right-wing paramilitary forces in the country.

[T]he IOB believes that Sister Dianna was subjected to horrific abuse on November 2, 1989, but US intelligence reports provide little insight into the details of her plight. Because the Department of Justice is still conducting an extensive reinvestigation of the incident, we do not draw any conclusions on the case at this time.

As a Catholic nun, Ortiz went to Guatemala in the 1987 for a two-year assignment to work with the poor and teach children to read. She joined sisters already working with the indigenous population in San Miguel Acatán and other small villages throughout the department of Huehuetenango. According to her account, in late 1988 the Bishop of Huehuetenango received an anonymous typed document accusing Ortiz and the other sisters in San Miguel of planning to meet with "subversives". This was followed in 1989 by written anonymous threats directed and delivered to Ortiz personally, while she was staying in more than one location, showing that she was under continued surveillance. In October 1989, she went to the retreat center of Posada de Belen in Antigua, Guatemala.

The civil case of Ortiz was combined by her legal representative, the Center for Constitutional Rights, with Xuncax v. Gramajo, in which eight Kanjobal Indians had filed a US civil suit against General Héctor Gramajo, Minister of Defense in Guatemala (1987-1990) under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA). They contended that he had command responsibility for the genocide against the Maya, which resulted in the deaths of most people in their village, as well as responsibility for other abuses. Their case was heard in federal court in Massachusetts in combination with Ortiz v. Gramajo, which was decided under the Torture Victim Protection Act (1992), the first to make use of the new law.

Dianna Ortiz (born 1961) is an American Roman Catholic sister of the Ursuline order. While serving as a missionary in Guatemala in 1989, she was abducted on November 2 by members of the Guatemalan military, detained, raped, and tortured for 24 hours before being released. After her release, Ortiz reported that an American was among her captors. This part of her account could not be confirmed.

Ortiz was born in 1961 in Grants, New Mexico, the middle of eight children born to Ambrosia and Pilar Ortiz, a homemaker and uranium miner, respectively. Wanting the religious life from the time she was a child, Dianna entered the novitiate at age 17 at the Ursuline Sisters of Mount St. Joseph in Maple Mount, western Kentucky. Upon completion, she was accepted as a sister of the Ursuline Order.