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Sister Dianna Ortiz
Sister Dianna Ortiz passed away on February 19 from cancer at the age of sixty-two. Ortiz was an Ursuline nun and a human rights activist who worked in the highlands of Guatemala beginning in 1987. In 2004, she wrote the award-winning book The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, which recounted her harrowing experience in Guatemala and her journey toward advocacy rooted in her own faith.
Ortiz’s 1995 court case resulted in a $47.5 million judgment against a Guatemalan military official.
Dennis Bernstein, host of Pacifica Radio’s program Flashpoints, recently interviewed investigative reporter, Allan Nairn, who in 1980 reported from Guatemala in the middle of an assassination campaign targeting student leaders, amid a chaotic counterinsurgency campaign against Marxist guerrillas active in both urban and rural areas.
Nairn interviewed United States corporate executives there, who endorsed the death squads, and he began to investigate death squad activities in that country and in El Salvador, also in the throes of a civil war. Nairn is the winner of numerous awards for his reporting. Both Bernstein and Nairn have contributed articles to The Progressive since the 1980s.
Q: The kinds of policies that the U.S. imposed in Central America, in particular in Guatemala, are still reverberating at the U.S. border. This became very clear in the case of Sister Dianna Ortiz. Could you talk about what happened with her?
Allan Nairn: Well, she was a nun working in Guatemala. And in 1989, she was abducted by the Guatemalan military. Tortured, gang raped. She managed to escape and exposed to the world the story of what had happened. She said that the person who seemed to be in charge of her captors spoke with an American accent. And, in fact, said he was taking her to the American embassy at the time she was able to flee from the car and escape. Immediately after, the U.S. Embassy reacted by smearing her and claiming to the Guatemalan military, to the foreign press, that she was making it up.
In fact, General Héctor Gramajo, who was the Army Chief of Staff, whose men carried out the abduction and torture of Sister Dianna, told the press that her injuries were sustained in a lesbian love tryst. And he said that this information had come to him from the U.S. Embassy. And in fact, it was the case that the U.S. ambassador, Thomas Stroock, who was a personal friend of U.S. President George H.W. Bush, and a State Department official named Lewis Amselem were putting out that lie to try to cover up for the fact that the Guatemalan military had carried out this abduction and torture.
And they did that because the Guatemalan military, which at that time was in the midst of a systematic program of political murder, was working for the U.S. government. They were being armed, trained, financed, and being given political cover by the United States. They committed what a Guatemalan court finally ruled a couple of years ago was an act of genocide against the Indigenous Mayan population. They committed numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity.
And that devastated Guatemalan society, this mass slaughter of an excess of 140,000 civilians. Some estimates have it more than 200,000. And to this day, Guatemalan society has not recovered from that . . .
Q: You mentioned Héctor Gramajo. He was the general in charge of leading the slaughters in the highlands for President Efraín Rios Montt. This is Héctor Gramajo, who after leading the slaughter in the highland, ends up at the Harvard Kennedy School. That’s where you found him and outed him.
Nairn: Yes. General Gramajo was one of the U.S.’s favorites. One of the top U.S. proteges. And as the Army Chief of Staff, he helped design the program of systematic massacres in the northwest highlands, where, by the army’s own estimate, they wiped out 662 Indigenous villages.
And Gramajo was one of those officers who I was able to verify—and I reported this back in the nineties—who had been on the CIA payroll. He was also repeatedly brought up to the United States for courses and meetings at places like Fort Leavenworth and the Pentagon. And after he finished his stint as Army Chief of Staff, he was brought up to Harvard for a master’s degree in public policy.
And Sister Dianna Ortiz, who campaigned with tremendous courage after her escape to expose what the U.S. was doing to the—the people of Guatemala, she and other survivors and families of victims brought a lawsuit in conjunction with the Center for Constitutional Rights. The late Michael Ratner was lead attorney on this. And I worked with them in helping to put together this case.
It was a case brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act, a U.S. statute which has since been weakened by court decisions. But at the time, it made it possible to sue perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity if they set foot on U.S. soil. They could be civilly sued in a U.S. Federal Court. And Gramajo was brought to trial at a U.S. Federal Court. He declined to appear, but Sister Ortiz and myself, and many other people presented extensive detailed evidence about his role, and that of the U.S. government in backing this slaughter in Guatemala. And the court found him liable for millions of dollars in damages.
Before the verdict came down, Gramajo had already fled back to Guatemala. But as far as I know, he was never renounced by Harvard, which had been sponsoring him.
Q: This was part of a much larger dynamic, no?
Nairn: This all stemmed out of a systematic U.S. program that first began during the Kennedy Administration. It encompassed Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Somoza’s Nicaragua, and Panama. And under this program, the United States set up security forces, which were linked with telecommunications installed by the CIA and the USAID public safety program, with assistance from the State Department and the Pentagon.
And most notably, they established massive death squad operations in El Salvador and Guatemala. I documented this extensively in a piece in The Progressive magazine in the 1980s. And that eventually led to hearings by the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, which confirmed the U.S. role in these death squad operations in El Salvador. Although only a sanitized version of the report was made public. The confidential version of the report, which was produced after reviewing a million pages of documents, remains classified to this day.
Of course, all of this is criminal. The Guatemalan officers who were directly carrying out the crimes, like the abduction and torture of Sister Ortiz, and who were carrying out the massacres in the 662 villages in the northwest highlands, they were committing crimes against humanity. As were all of the U.S. officials who were arming them, financing them, training them, equipping them, and even running political interference for them.
And although some of these Guatemalan officials have, through the bravery of figures like Sister Ortiz and the Guatemalan survivors and the families of the massacre victims, been brought to court in various cases, including most notably, a genocide case, which was filed against General Rios Montt who was found guilty of genocide (and eventually died while under house arrest).
These American officials have never faced trial. And in this country, we have not yet reached the level of civilization that Guatemala has. So, we can’t even talk about, we can’t even think about, we can’t even conceive putting these American generals and CIA officials and State Department officials on trial for their role in these—these massive felonies, these crimes against humanity. These tortures, abductions, and mass murders.
So Sister Ortiz made a heroic contribution to the people of Guatemala and to the people of the United States. I hope eventually her work will be recognized when American eyes are finally opened to what our government has been doing.
Q: This death squad policy throughout Central America that was supported by the U.S. government continues to reverberate and be a major challenge in terms of how we are going to live in this hemisphere.
Nairn: The way that reverberates today is that the society has yet to recover—although these massive death squad operations are no longer carried out, because they’re no longer necessary—the social movements were so badly crippled and crushed by these operations that oligarchs and the military don’t face the kind of grassroots opposition that did before the massacres. They still do killings, but they’re more selective than they used to be. And some of these killings, in fact, are carried out by or on behalf of foreign mining interests, American and Canadian, who are now moving into Guatemala.
But the army—the Guatemalan army and the oligarchy that were the beneficiaries and the direct perpetrators of these crimes, they’re still in power. And it has now become more of a klepto-state. It’s a massive theft operation by the oligarchs and a criminal class that’s mainly common criminals. Many of them [are] drug dealers who dominate the state executive apparatus and the Congress of Guatemala. And they’re just stealing with both hands.
Public services are in collapse. The public hospital system is barely functioning. The public bus system periodically has to shut down various routes because the drivers go on strike because they’re either not being paid, or they’re being extorted and threatened with death by gangs. Many of [these gangs], and this has been extensively documented in the Guatemalan courts and in the Guatemalan press, are run by military and political officials, some of whom are in jail, but they still run them from inside their luxury cells.