The Blindfold's Eyes
Ortiz, Sister Dianna & Patricia
WHERE WAS GOD? The Bllndfold's Eyes My Journey from Torture to Truth Sister Dianna Ortiz with Patricia Davis Orbis Book $25,480 pp. Suzanne Travers n 1989, two years into a stint as a...
...She was a person who had not worn seatbelts because of a "naive" belief in God's protection, but where was God's protection in her cell...
...Was he an American...
...Neither will they find the poetry of torture accounts like Argentine writer Jacobo Timmerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number...
...intelligence and its ties to torturers...
...Excerpts of journal entries and letters are interwoven with Ortiz's recollections...
...Suzanne Travers n 1989, two years into a stint as a missionary teacher in Guatemala, Dianna Ortiz an Ursuline sister from New Mexico was abducted by Guatemalan security forces...
...Legal matters also occupy the second half of the book, in particular Ortiz's quest to get the U.S...
...Many torture victims face this poignant dilemma...
...He mentioned "a friend at the U.S...
...As a college teacher told her, Ortiz was a "fragile" person to begin with...
...she did not recognize them...
...Finally, the Organization of American States issued a report in 1997 finding her claims of torture highly credible...
...This only compounded her pain as she became, in her own eyes, as evil as her torturers...
...This is because more than physical injury, the lasting effects of torture come from how it shatters one's most basic assumptions about oneself and one's sense of the world...
...What was someone with ties to the U.S...
...Nearly five hundred pages, the book has the feel of a documentary film, complete with voice-over narration...
...Could she heal enough to bring her torturers to justice...
...These institutions viewed her case with varying degrees of skepticism as they sought to avoid the political and public-relations nightmare it entailed...
...For a horrific twenty-four hours, she was repeatedly raped, beaten, and burned more than a hundred times with cigarettes...
...To her credit but at her own emotional expense, Ortiz pursued her case, persevering through long, largely fruitless proceedings by the Guatemalan government, the U.S...
...Ortiz had specific beliefs that gave her torture its unique devastations...
...A man called Alejandro came to release her from her cell, speaking English well and Spanish badly...
...Her story, however, illustrates how torture works and underscores how differently it can affect individuals...
...Not everyone reacts to torture like I did," she writes in the epilogue...
...The shock of realizing what she and others were capable of left her paralyzed...
...Did the U.S...
...Would she ever heal if they were not...
...At times the writing reads like a legal argument, at other times like a therapeutic recovery manual...
...Some of her experiences can tax a reader's patience...
...Declassified cables from the U.S...
...Who is Alejandro...
...After stabbing "The Woman" and having an abortion, she was filled with guilt and a loss of identity...
...Her ties with others, particularly the Ursulines, were also damaged...
...Initially, she remembered little of her life before the torture...
...she asks again and again...
...Pregnant by the rape, she had an abortion...
...Ortiz suffered severe posttraumatic stress in the years after her abduction...
...When some fellow Ursulines wondered why, after months of treatment, Ortiz couldn't just "get over it," I could sympathize...
...Ortiz makes a case for how many of her reactions were typical of torture victims: she frequently washed with bleach, broke down while testifying, and considered suicide...
...Sensing their frustration and fearing their rejection should they discover her abortion, Ortiz took a leave of absence from the community...
...Suzanne Travers covers immigration for the Herald-News of Paterson, New Jersey, and teaches Latin American politics at Rutgers University-Newark.ers University-Newark...
...As often as these efforts sustained each other, they clashed...
...They define The Blindfold's Eyes...
...Family members and Ursuline sisters sought to comfort her...
...Ortiz began to heal at a treatment center for torture survivors in Chicago, and the book gets better as Ortiz gets stronger...
...She founded her own organization, the Torture Abolition and Survivors Coalition...
...embassy, State Department, and Justice Department...
...Bursts of literary grace do shine through, especially in Ortiz's vivid descriptions of her emotional state or mental outlook...
...Feelings of shame kept Ortiz from immediately acknowledging her rape, so she later lacked forensic evidence to prove that it had happened...
...As a story of personal healing and legal pursuit, these deep emotions are at the center of her struggle...
...embassy...
...Worse, she was forced to participate in the torture of another woman, holding a machete handle as her torturer plunged the blade into the woman's body...
...she asks...
...The next day, Ortiz escaped, but not before her ordeal took another sinister twist...
...How could a Catholic nun commit such acts...
...When lawyers and government investigators questioned her, she often suffered debilitating flashbacks that seemed to erode her progress in emotional recovery...
...Friends reconstruct events and help tell pieces of the story obscured by Ortiz's amnesia...
...As a religious, her identity suffered a particularly strong blow...
...embassy and State Department, speeches, and press announcements are interspersed with news summaries and Ortiz's analysis of these representations...
...government, through covert operations and the CIA, lent direct and indirect support to Guatemalan torturers and mass murderers...
...government to divulge what it knew about her torture...
...Understandably, Ortiz initially lacked perspective on her situation, and it is a relief when she acquires more as the story unfolds...
...Through Ortiz's work and that of others like her friend Jennifer Harbury, an American lawyer whose husband (a guerrilla fighter) was killed by the Guatemalan military, much has surfaced about U.S...
...embassy doing in her torture cell...
...After examining thousands of pages of documents, Ortiz contends the U.S...
...In 1999, a UN truth commission in Guatemala found that the U.S...
...Typical as her responses were nightmares, amnesia, feelings of guilt and shame Ortiz's reaction seemed particularly severe...
...government covered up its knowledge of and possible involvement in her abduction, thereby preventing her from bringing her torturers to justice...
...Throughout the book, it is clear that Ortiz is torn by an intense need, typical of torture victims, to be believed, and a fear that as in torture her words will betray her...
...Instead, she lived to discover that surviving torture is often more painful than the torture itself...
...government have some connection to Ortiz's torture...
...Those expecting a gory account of torture won't find it here...
...She became a prominent activist, working with the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission in Washington, D.C...
...Had she died, Ortiz would have joined the list of church workers martyred in Central America, and have been counted among the 200,000 murdered (most by the military) in Guatemala's brutal, thirty-six-year civil war...
...Still, The Blindfold's Eyes chronicles Ortiz's two powerfully linked struggles: one to find psychological and emotional healing, the other to pursue truth and bring her torturers to justice...
Vol. 130 • January 2003 • No. 2
