by Jo Piazza
She had a reason to be afraid. She should have been more afraid.
It isn’t easy to tell Sister Dianna’s story. In so many ways she is a woman still painfully broken from her experience in Guatemala all those years ago. Just speaking about it brings her intense psychological pain, while her every movement reminds her of the physical pain inflicted on her young body. She is a survivor who has channeled a terrible experience into a way to help others. For that and for many other reasons I am in awe of her. What follows was difficult for her to tell me, hard for me to hear from Sister Dianna’s mouth, challenging to write, and may be problematic for the sensitive reader.
When she first traveled to the Central American country in 1987, Sister Dianna Mae Ortiz, a young Ursuline nun from New Mexico with clear, bright, coffee-colored eyes; a toothy smile embedded into delicate features; and dark curly hair, planned to live in Guatemala for the rest of her life.
“I thought I would breathe my last breath there,” she told me the first time we spoke in 2012. Fiercely dedicated to the children there, she loved the people like family and taught them Spanish in the hopes that they could one day pull themselves out of the worst kind of poverty. She never wanted to do anything else except live among these people and serve God. When Dianna was just six years old, her parents asked each of her siblings what they wanted to be when they grew up. Dianna didn’t blink or pause like the other kids. “A nun,” she said with a casino dealer’s certainty. She just kept saying it too, to anyone who would listen, which forced her into a kind of social isolation. The girls in her school teased her. In junior high and high school they crossed themselves and laughed when she walked by, but she ignored them, feeling strong and confident in what she wanted to do with her future.
During her junior year, as other kids were filling out college applications, Dianna began to put her plan into action. She visited an Ursuline sister who was the principal of a local school to inquire about how she could become a nun. That sister invited her to the Ursuline motherhouse in Maple Mount, Kentucky. She spent her senior year at the girls’ school there and went on to a nearby Catholic college to receive a degree in education, making her temporary vows with the Ursulines before she graduated. Sister Dianna finally felt at home.
Once she settled into convent life, the teasing continued, but in a good-natured way that no longer bothered her. Her nicknames in the convent were “The Prima Donna” and “Lady Di.” She was modest and neat, with clothes always perfectly ironed. There she developed strong friendships that would last her entire life. Once she became a sister, all Sister Dianna wanted to do was serve as a missionary in Central America. With parents of Spanish and Mexican heritage, she felt called to learn more about her family’s history and travel to a place where she could immerse herself in Hispanic culture.
In 1987 her wish was granted when she was sent to work as a missionary in a small indigenous village in Guatemala. It took forty-four hours by bus from Mexico City to reach Guatemala City. From there she left for San Miguel Acatán, a cripplingly poor rural Mayan village, where 80 percent of the population under the age of five suffered from malnutrition, to teach grade-school children how to read and write. She learned a few phrases in the local dialect, K’anjobal, and set out to convince the wary villagers that she was there to stay. They were distrustful. For five hundred years these people had watched as foreigners came to their country, took what they wanted, and walked away. “Everyone who has come here has left us,” they told her. “You’re not going to abandon us too?”
“No, I will never leave you,” she told them.
Sister Dianna expected to teach kindergarten, ages five to seven, but there were so few teachers that she ended up with a class of students from ages three to fourteen. Many of them had never held a pencil, seen a book, or used a crayon before. Because her initial intention was to teach them in Spanish, she had gone to language training for several months to become fluent. It was quickly apparent that speaking to the Mayan children in Spanish was useless.
“What I later learned was that education is a threat to governments,” Sister Dianna told me. “When someone teaches people to read and write and be proud of who they are, it teaches them to demand more from a society than brutal oppression. They become dangerous.” So she worked with the local women to create a system of translation—from the kids to a translator to her—and then reversed it.
Guatemala in the 1980s was a dangerous place. In 1982, the violent overthrow of the government led the military to take their aggression out on poor indigenous people in the countryside, the very people Sister Dianna was ministering to. The Army unleashed a scorched-earth campaign designed to destroy anyone viewed as an insurgent against the government and obliterated 440 rural villages. Human rights organizations estimated that as many as 100,000 Guatemalans were abducted or killed by their own government in the 1980s. Torture, disappearances, and massacres were routine. Anyone considered a threat was eliminated. Many of the victims were women. Most of the people who disappeared were found dead. Priests and religious workers were regularly hunted down and killed by an army that viewed them as allies of the guerillas, as well as Communist sympathizers.
When Sister Dianna first arrived, the people in San Miguel told her a story: The military had come in one day and told the women they would be killed if they didn’t cook them tortillas. When they had cooked the tortillas, the guerillas came to the village to cut their heads off for cooking for the military. The village, they said, had no allies on either side.
Despite all that, many of Sister Dianna’s memories of her early days in the village were happy ones. She remembers fondly her walks with the children and how they collected stones to build miniature prayer altars for her. On the days they did not walk, the children would knock on the nun’s door and then bolt away quickly when she answered, leaving their small offering of stones outside the doorframe.
“It was symbolic,” she recalled. “[The children] were my rocks.”
By the time the threats arrived, she was committed to these people, but Sister Dianna knew that as a foreigner she had an easy way out. Americans could always just go home, where the threats would never follow them, and it would be written off as a journey gone wrong. She would have other adventures. But what gnawed at her was whether she could leave all those children with whomever was placing her life in danger.
Ultimately, Sister Dianna didn’t think it was her decision to make—it was God’s. She made retreats and prayed for hours on end. One day, reading the Bible in the garden of the retreat house with her friend Sister Darleen, she dared the book to fall open to any passage. When it landed, spine flat on the ground and pages open to the sky, staring at her was the story of Jeremiah, the prophet who remained with his people despite his persecution by his friends and family. The officials and the nobles of Babylon “took Jeremiah out of the court of the guardhouse and entrusted him to Gedaliah, the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, to take him home. So he stayed among the people.”
She had her answer. God was telling her not to flee.
“I remember my eyes resting on that page and there was a moment of indescribable peace, like an embrace from God. I knew that the road I would be walking down, I would not be walking alone. There was my answer. I knew I would stay with the people of Guatemala,” she told me.
On the morning of November 2, 1989, Sister Dianna was on another religious retreat in the neighboring village of Antigua. A scruffy man wearing a Rambo T-shirt appeared in the garden behind the retreat house with a gun in one pocket and a hand grenade in the other. He swiftly reached out and grabbed the young nun, yanking her violently through a hole in the wall. “Please, God, let this be a dream,” she remembers thinking as he blindfolded her. “Hola mi amor! We have some things to discuss,” the man said.
Her captor threatened to release a hand grenade if she did not board a public bus with him. So she did. The bus stopped in the small to
wn of Mixco, where the man and two compatriots escorted her to a waiting car. There were three captors—a man named Jose and two others, whom she nicknamed “The Policeman” and “The Guate-man” to keep them straight in her head. “Guate-man” is short for a man from Guatemala City. Sister Dianna was terrified to realize that she recognized him from a recent trip she had made to the city to run errands. He had walked up next to her on a busy street and grabbed her by the arm. “We know who you are. We know where you live,” he had hissed in her ear. Jose was a dark-skinned Mayan man with matted hair and a bad eye. He was the first to introduce himself once they arrived at a compound that she would later describe as a secret prison.
“They tell me you are a nun. Is that true?” Jose asked her once he had her locked in a cell in a dilapidated building in the middle of nowhere. “I go to church every Sunday and read the Holy Bible every day. Since you are a nun, surely you must know if God forgives people for the sins they have committed. I don’t like my work. But I have a wife. I have children. . . . Sometimes we live at the expense of others.”
Jose believed that the presence of a sister elevated the dingy jail cell into a confessional booth. A spigot was opened and stories of his sins poured out of him like raw sewage from a gutter. He described raiding a town in the north of the country. There he armed each of the boys in that village with a can of gasoline and told them to douse their own homes and light them on fire. Petrified, a small boy clasped his mother’s skirt, paralyzed. An older man begged Jose to be allowed to take the little boy’s place. So, Jose told Sister Dianna, he slammed the two of them in the head with the butt of his rifle. The small boy’s head split in two halves like a ripe watermelon. The rest of the children did as they were told and turned their town to ash.
“We took the women to the chapel. I hate to tell you what we did to them,” he told the nun, his breath hot against her skin. “Old women, young girls, very young, pregnant women.”
He seemed proud before catching a flash of remorse. “I did not want to do it. I have nothing against you, Madre. Can you forgive me?” he asked. “If you, a nun, can forgive me, maybe God, too, can forgive me.”
Sister Dianna didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know if this man would let her live or be the one to kill her. What was the right answer? Was there even a right answer? She told him he would have to ask for forgiveness from God and from those whose lives he had silenced. He didn’t like that. “I am sorry, Madre. I could have saved you,” he said. “If you had forgiven me, I could have saved you.”
First came her interrogation. They played a “game.” If she answered a question the way they liked, she would be allowed to smoke a cigarette. If they didn’t like what she said, they would burn her with it.
Next, Sister Dianna was suspended over a pit full of bodies—men, women, children, some decapitated, all caked in blood. Some were still alive. Moaning. Rats ran across the bodies and swarmed Sister Dianna as she was suspended over the top of the pit, held aloft by her bruised wrists.
There was just one source of strength for her in that hellhole: her cellmate, a woman who had been severely tortured. From a cot across the room, the woman turned her head and tried to smile at Sister Dianna. Her breasts had been cut open. Maggots swarmed inside them. Sensing that the woman needed to feel her touch, Sister Dianna moved toward her and grabbed her hand.
But perhaps Sister Dianna needed the woman more than the woman needed her. “Dianna, be strong. They will try to break you,” the woman whispered through cracked and bloodied lips. The nun would repeat those words over and over again in her head. Three words—Dianna, Be Strong—kept her from completely abandoning faith that people could be good. “In that prison cell, where I witnessed the near-death of my faith, I made a promise to her and to the others who were there that I would tell the world what I had witnessed,” Sister Dianna told me.
She lay with the woman for several hours before all three of her captors burst into the cell. She describes what happened next as her soul’s darkest moment, the moment she felt crushed by Satan. “Everything that made my life worth living withered. Hope vanished. I became a lost spirit in a world that didn’t make sense,” she said.
One of the men walked toward Sister Dianna and handed her a machete, then stood behind her and trapped her hands beneath his. He placed his callused hands over hers and forced her to stab at the woman over and over again. She couldn’t stop him. His full weight bore down on her tiny hands. She could only look away and sob.
Then they gambled for Sister Dianna’s body.
“Heads I go first, tails you go,” one said. “Heads. She’s mine.”
Sister Dianna shifted her weight into him, softened her rigid stance, and commanded her hands to touch his body.
“Hey, she wants me,” the captor bragged.
She’d had enough. She mustered all of the grit she wished she’d had when they forced her to harm the woman. She stepped quickly backward, thrusting her knee with all of the strength of her five-foot frame into his groin. He tossed her to the floor like a bale of hay.
“Forgive me, please. Give me another chance,” she begged. A fist rammed into her stomach.
He climbed on top of her and tore at her clothes, reeking of alcohol, cigarettes, and body odor.
“I want to see your pretty face,” he said, snatching her blindfold away while he slid his slimy tongue across her eyelids, nose, and cheeks. He pried open her eyes and ripped her jeans and underwear off. His eyes were just black holes, devoid of any emotion.
As he finished, he whispered in her ear, “Gracias. Your God is dead.”
They blindfolded her and prepared to rape her again, yelling out in Spanish to a new man. This one was tall with fair skin. He responded in perfect English and with no trace of an accent, “Shit!”
In broken Spanish, he began swearing. “Idiots! She’s a North American nun and it is all over the news.”
“Are you American?” Sister Dianna asked the new man.
“Why do you want to know?” he answered her in Spanish.
He had her clothes brought to her and helped her put on her T-shirt and sweatshirt.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here,” he said, as if it had been an option she could have exercised all along, as if the door to freedom had always been just a polite question and a few steps away.
“I’m sorry, so sorry. It was a mistake,” he said, leading her down a long hallway. “You must forgive them. They had the wrong person. They thought you were Veronica Ortiz Hernandez.”
She knew they didn’t think she was Veronica Ortiz Hernandez. Ms. Hernandez was a leftist guerilla freedom fighter. The death threats she received were addressed to Madre Dianna, not Veronica Ortiz.
The man Sister Dianna suspected of being an American ushered her into the passenger seat of a gray Suzuki jeep with a rabbit’s foot dangling from the rearview mirror. His hair was brown, curly, and too shiny. She suspected it was a wig.
“I’ll take you to a friend at the US embassy who can help you leave the country,” he said over classical music playing on the radio. “We tried to warn you with threats to prevent this. You wouldn’t leave.” Anger tinged his voice.
“I stayed because I have a commitment to the people,” she said.
“I have a commitment to the people too, to liberate them from Communists.”
“Your commitment is different because you don’t respect human life,” she replied.
Why was she arguing with him? She couldn’t stop herself. She began to wonder whether they were actually heading for the US embassy. Why would he tell her these things and then set her free?
Sister Dianna looked around. The traffic was picking up. She saw a sign for Zone 5. Zone 5 meant they were close to the capital.
At a red light, the American slowed the car. She opened the door and jumped out, bracing herself as she hit the pavement. She ran as fast as
she could. She didn’t look back.
She ran straight into an indigenous woman. “Sister Dianna,” the woman said, apparently recognizing her from the news.
“I escaped,” Sister Dianna was able to cough.
“Come with me,” the woman said, and grabbed her arm. “You’ll be safe.”
The woman guided her into a little house and brought her chamomile tea and a plate of beans and tortillas. Her body was numb and tears gushed down her cheeks. The woman told Sister Dianna to rest and pray, but she felt she needed a plan. She needed to leave the country. Her passport was all the way in Zone 1, locked in the manager’s desk at Hayter’s Travel. Sister Dianna told her host she needed to get to Zone 1. The woman gave her directions and bus fare. “Don’t tell anyone anything about me,” she warned as she said good-bye.
Once at the travel agency, Sister Dianna was able to call Sister Darleen and was moved to the Vatican embassy. The next three days, she bathed every hour, spending the rest of the time facedown in bed.
The headlines all said “US Nun Released.” She wanted to tell them that that wasn’t true. She wasn’t released. She escaped. She didn’t know whom to tell. She didn’t know who would believe her.
Her torturers had told her repeatedly that no one would ever believe her story, and as it turns out, they were right. The Guatemalan government was quick to deny any involvement in her kidnapping. “What happened to Dianna Ortiz was self-kidnapping,” the stories in Guatemala said.
According to General Carlos Morales, the minister of the interior for Guatemala: “In no moment did police authorities have anything to do with this incident and for this reason the government has closed the case.” Guatemalan defense minister Hector Gramajo told an Americas Watch investigator that Sister Dianna was abducted when she snuck out to meet a lesbian lover. Gramajo called her accusations a big injustice to Guatemala and to its security forces.