User:Vielka.g/Dianna Ortiz

Early life and education
Ortiz was born on September 2, 1958, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, 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.

Additions: Dianna attended San Jose Elementary School and Sierra Vista Elementary School. For high school, she spent her freshman, sophomore, and junior years at Grants High School in New Mexico, while ending her senior year at Mount Saint Joseph Academy. In Ursuline, she taught children while being very young herself. Sister Dianna worked at the Ursuline Order for 43 years. Her parents were immigrants from Mexico and they spoke Spanish eventually through them she learned to speak Spanish. Her father worked as a miner, while her mother worked around the house.

Abduction and torture
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.

She said a man named Alejandro was among her torturers, and that she heard him speak English with a North American accent. She wrote in her memoir that her torture stopped"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."He was taking her to a friend (to be taken to the American embassy) when she escaped. She said he told her she had been mistaken for a guerrilla with a similar name, Verónica Ortiz Hernández. Ortiz knew this woman, an indigenous Guatemalan, and said she did not resemble her. When she questioned him about that, she said that Alejandro "insinuated that I was to blame for my torture because I had not heeded the threats that were sent to me." She returned to the U.S. from Guatemala within 48 hours of her escape.

After being released, Ortiz later said:"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."She saw a doctor in Guatemala and another after she returned to the United States; both later submitted testimony that she showed evidence of torture, including extensive cigarette burns. Ortiz suffered greatly from her experience; like other torture victims, she lost many of her memories from the period before she went to Guatemala. After returning to the U.S., she had to be reintroduced to her family. It took her a long time to rebuild her trust in people. In addition, she later recounted, she learned she was pregnant from the rapes. Overwhelmed by the treatment she had received, she got an abortion. This added to her survivor's guilt and emotional burden.

Additions:
Before being abducted and following her transfer from the Ursuline convent to Guatemala, Ortiz started getting death threats. In addition to being raped, and tortured repeatedly, Ortiz was forced to torture and stab another victim to death with a machete.

Ortiz was placed in a Catholic psychiatric asylum, where she would be under intense care. Under psychiatric care, she would become friends with another patient who would be influential in her recovery.

U.S. and Guatemala official denials of involvement
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."

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

Additions:
The Government claimed that the allegations were false, stating that "items which were later found were intentionally placed in the garden to provide greater realism to the story of the kidnapping". Ortiz also explicitly mentions that General Héctor Gramajo, and General Carlos Morales told press that her abduction was a hoax. General Héctor Gramajo, the Chief of Staff of the Army, oversaw the troops who tortured and kidnapped Ortiz. In order to obscure their actions, they reported that Ortiz's injuries were caused by a "lesbian love tryst". President George W. Bush of the United States, took part in the denial that the Guatemalan military was involved in the crime in order to preserve their relationships with the military there. Guatemalan military was protected under US law and worked for the US government.

Despite the denials, the Commission, also known as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, ruled that Ortiz was telling the truth and that all of the accusations made against the Guatemalan military were legitimate. The administration was held accountable for the atrocities perpetrated against Ortiz since they linked more violent activities on behalf of Guatemalan citizens to officials in the government.

Ortiz eventually won her case against General Héctor Gramajo and it was ruled that he would never be allowed to enter the U.S.

Ortiz hunger strike
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 U.S. government's investigation. Her protests had been preceded by those of Jennifer Harbury and members of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission, seeking U.S. action on learning the fates of many "disappeared" in the country. Harbury's husband Efraín Bámaca Velásquez [es], 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 Bámaca Velásquez by a death squad.

Additions:
She went on a five-week hunger strike in protest. In order to prevent her torturers from harming another person in Guatemala, Ortiz intended to gather as much information as possible about her situation and them. Ortiz anticipated being the voice for others who could not openly comment on human rights abuses because they sought political refuge, despite dropping 10 pounds over the first three weeks of the hunger strike.

Despie the lack of compliance from government officials, the First Lady Hillary Clinton, had sympathy for Ortiz and greatly assisted in providing official documents and identification related to her case.

Human Rights Work
In 1994, Dianna Ortiz began working at the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA (GHRC). GHRC's director, Sister Alice Zachmann, had advocated for her release from clandestine detention in 1989 and had invited Dianna to give the keynote address at GHRC's 1992 International Conference on Torture in Guatemala. Dianna's work at GHRC involved advocacy work, public speaking, and help with all aspects of the small organization. While at GHRC, Dianna conducted her hunger strike and vigil in front of the White House.

In 1998, while working at the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA, Ortiz founded the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) as a project of GHRC/USA. TASSC received its 501(c)3 status in 2002, becoming the only organization in the U.S. founded by and for survivors of torture. It provides support particularly to survivors living in the U.S., as many refugees had come from nations in Central and South America where states had sponsored terrorism against citizens.

During the 2000s, TASSC became involved in issues related to treatment of detainees at the U.S. 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 U.S.'s existing civilian and military justice systems to prosecute detainees being held at Guantanamo. Congress approved this legislation after the U.S. Supreme Court held that the George W. Bush administration's military commissions, set up only under executive branch authority, were unconstitutional.

Additions:
TASSC was founded as a pledge from Ortiz to the public that she would work to stop others from going through similar challenging circumstances. Her experiences prompted her to seek justice for herself and others in the midst of the political violence.

"TASSC is unique in the United States as the only organization led by torture survivors themselves, operating from the core belief that survivors understand their needs best and must be at the core of decisions about the healing process". After speaking with and interviewing torture victims all across the world, Ortiz was inspired and felt driven to start an advocacy organization. TASSC increased the access of resources for survivors despite the increasing number of torture survivors across Latin America and the United States.

(New Entry) Guatemala's Civil War
When Ortiz's abduction took place, Guatemala was experiencing a civil war that lasted 36 years since the early 1960s and mostly targeted Mayan people. The war was a conflict between right-wing politicians and communist movements. At the time the civil war began, Guatemala was under General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes' rule. Roughly 200,000 people were killed during these events, and 83 percent of them were Mayans - these civilians had been violated by the government and armed forces. Individuals and villages from socioeconomic backgrounds were also wiped out due to large massacres that were a result of government repression.

The United States intervened on behalf of Guatemala when the military forces there were abusing a number of human rights at the time of Ortiz's kidnapping. The United States trained "officers in counterinsurgency techniques and assisted the national intelligence apparatus". The methods employed by the military and administration of Guatemala made it possible for Ortiz to be kidnapped. Guatemala committed crimes, kidnappings, and brutal techniques without claiming accountability.

In 1977 the U.S. stopped providing military funding due the the human rights issues. Congress also imposed "imposing restrictions on military aid, citing human rights violations".