Dianna Ortiz, Catholic nun whose abduction and torture in Guatemala shone a light on US meddling abroad – obituary

Sister Dianna Ortiz, who has died aged 62, was an Ursuline nun abducted and tortured by Guatemalan security forces in 1989; later she gave a graphic account of horrors inflicted, making headlines with the claim that her tormentors had been supervised by a mysterious “Alejandro”, who, she said, spoke halting Spanish “with a thick American accent”. His English, she insisted, “was American, flawless, unaccented”.

Her ordeal began on November 2 1989 when she was abducted from a small Roman Catholic mission in the mountain village of San Miguel Acatán, in the impoverished highlands of western Guatemala where she was teaching indigenous children; she was taken by car to a warehouse on the outskirts of Guatemala City.

Her kidnap lasted a day, but left lasting physical and psychological scars. She was burnt more than 100 times with cigarettes and repeatedly raped. Eventually she passed out and regained consciousness in a courtyard, where she saw a large block being removed from the ground. “There was a pit underneath and a horrible smell. I was lowered into the pit. It was filled with dead bodies … some were jerking,” she recalled. “I heard someone crying. I did not know if it was me or someone else.”

Taken back to her interrogation room, she was raped again. By her account her captors then invited “Alejandro” to “come have some fun”. But the man told them to leave her alone, with the words: “Idiots, she is a North American … It’s already on the news on television.” He drove her to the city centre, but she escaped from the car on the way.

Her captors never gave her a reason, though ultra-Right forces in Guatemala were known to believe the Catholic Church was supporting leftists in the country’s long-running civil war.

Sister Dianna claimed that she had become pregnant during the assaults and, after returning home, had had an abortion. The trauma left her with very little memory of her previous life and it took years of therapy before she started to recover.

When in 1990 she made formal charges against Guatemala’s security forces, the country’s defence minister denounced her allegations as a “fantasy” cooked up after a sado-masochistic lesbian tryst went wrong.

Documents released much later indicate that US officials also questioned her account. A 1989 cable from the US embassy in Guatemala ran: “For a person who apparently knew little Spanish … had not slept for 24 hours, had suffered an intensive torture session … and in deep shock rendering her incapable of talking, Sister Dianna seemed to have little difficulty escaping by jumping out of a moving car, running at high speed, asking Guatemalans for protection.”

Over the years Sister Dianna pursued the matter through American and Guatemalan courts, gave interviews, staged a hunger strike and campaigned for the release of files on her case and on human rights abuses in Guatemala.

It was said to be the intervention in 1996 of the then First Lady Hillary Clinton that led to the release of CIA papers and the declassification of decades of documents showing that Guatemalan forces implicated in acts of genocide during the 36-year civil war had been equipped and trained by the US. In 1999 President Bill Clinton apologised for the American involvement in Guatemala’s civil war.

Frustratingly, however, the CIA documents were heavily redacted and did not reveal the identity of the abductor called “Alejandro”.

One of eight children, Dianna Mae Ortiz was born on September 2 1958 in Colorado Springs, and entered the Ursuline novitiate in 1977. While undergoing her religious training, she qualified as an teacher. She moved to Guatemala in 1987.

After her ordeal she worked for the Guatemala Human Rights Commission and helped to found the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition.

Sister Dianna Ortiz, born September 2 1958, died February 19 2021