Horror Retold in Lafayette Square
By Mary McGrory
Column: MARY McGRORY
Tuesday, April 2, 1996
; Page A02
Sister Dianna Ortiz stood under the budding tulip trees of Lafayette Square
and implored the man across the street to feel her pain.
Sister Dianna doesn't look much older than President Clinton's 16-year-old
daughter Chelsea, but she is a 37-year-old Ursuline nun who survived a hideous
chapter in Guatemala's grim story. In 1989, she was kidnapped, raped and
tortured by Guatemalan death squads and turned loose with 111 cigarette burns
on her body and a story nobody wanted to believe.
They still don't. The government's attitude was pretty well played out by
Park Police. Just as the gathering -- several hundred casually dressed nuns
and priests -- was getting underway, the police came and demanded to see the
permit. It was, they said, for the east side. They must uproot the lectern and
resettle some four yards from where they were. The government, which has yet
to give Sister Dianna one paper related to her case, has felt all along that
she should keep moving.
A year ago, President Clinton ordered the Intelligence Oversight Board to
conduct a probe. The only word she and her lawyers have received is: wait.
She feels she has waited long enough. There is steel in the fragile frame,
a cool head under the silky black hair. She will keep a vigil in Lafayette
Square 21 hours a day until the administration divulges what it knows about
her ordeal and the identity of a man called "Alejandro" who supervised her
torture, and who spoke "unmistakable" American English and broken Spanish. He
proposed to take her to the U.S. Embassy, where a friend of his would help
her. She jumped out of his jeep when it was stopped in traffic on the way.
In the park, she was surrounded by several hundred sympathizers. They
listened in rapt, horrified silence as she began to read, in a clear, steady
voice, an account of what she endured beginning on Nov. 2, 1989. She has told
the story many times, to U.S. and Guatemalan officials, none of whom have done
anything she knows of to bring her torturers or Alejandro to justice.
In previous testimony, she has left out one incident. This time, she told
her "guilty" secret. In six years, she could bring herself to tell only three
or four people about the ultimate horror. She could talk about what happened
to her; martyrdom is for her manageable. But what happened to another woman
because of her haunts her night and day. As she approached the heart of
darkness in her story, Sister Dianna's voice began to tremble. She had been
handed a small machete by her torturers. "[They] put their hands onto the
handle, on top of mine. And I had no choice, I was forced to use it against
another human being. What I remember is blood gushing -- spurting like a water
fountain -- droplets of blood spattering everywhere."
That is what she cannot live with.
She shook her head, and then she laid her shiny head down on the lectern on
her folded arms, and sobbed. Friends came and led her over to the side. She
collapsed into the arms of Jennifer Harbury's attorney, Jose Pertierra.
Harbury's husband, a Guatemalan rebel leader, was killed by death squads --
she says with CIA complicity. Pat Drake of the Guatemala Human Rights
Commission, where Sister Dianna now works, took up the reading. Sister Dianna,
looking drained, came back for the end.
While she was recovering, her friends explained her qualities. Sister Alice
Zachman, the humble and redoubtable head of the Guatemala Human Rights
Commission, said Sister Dianna is an artist, a poet and a musician -- although
she doesn't play the guitar anymore. "She never sleeps. She keeps the radio
and the light on. She's fending off nightmares." Betsy Swart, an
environmentalist who volunteers at the commission, says Sister Dianna enjoys
daily life and "is always doing sweet things for people in the office."
Central American thugs have a special animus against gringo women who teach
their people subversive doctrines like justice and democracy. U.S. officials
of the "better-dead-than-red" school hated to condemn fascist friends. When
four U.S. nuns were slaughtered in El Salvador in 1980, our secretary of
state, Alexander Haig, said they might have been running a roadblock.
Fortunately, one of the sisters, Ita Ford, had a combative Manhattan lawyer
for a brother, and he fought back.
All Sister Dianna asks her government for is the truth, if tax dollars were
paying Alejandro and her other torturers.
Before the somber afternoon was over, after the palms were distributed and
the Scriptures were read, she looked surprisingly up to challenging a
president. A young man stepped up to the microphone and began to sing the
anthem of those without human rights. "We are broken, tortured people, and we
are singing for our lives."
Wiped out as she was, Sister Dianna sang along.
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