Torture

Last night I heard a most powerful account of a torture victim, Dianna Ortiz, a nun who suffered unspeakable cruelty in Guatemala. She was a young convent graduate who went to Guatemala to teach Mayan children to read and write and to "be proud of their culture."She was abducted in 1989 after numerous death threats and tortured by Guatemalan police, apparently in collusion with American military personnel. Political considerations aside, her individual account of her degradation was incredibly sad.

As she stated, "I wish each of you could have one minute to look into my soul." During several times in her presentation, she backed away from the podium and sat in a nearby chair weeping for minutes on end. She seemed to be crying from a place deep in her soul that we could not see. She seemed to be crying not only for herself, but for torture victims everywhere, for the "woman who is being raped by a coke bottle being thrust in her vagina, for the man who is being 'waterboarded' in a pool filled with human waste, for the mother who is watching the fingernails and toenails being pulled out of her two and a half-year old baby in front of her."

Her promise to herself while in solitary confinement was that she would tell the world the story of her those who tortured her, and not shutter them away in the inner confines of her mind. She also made the point that 98% of the torture victims she has met have confessed to things they did not do in order to avoid further psychological and physical pain--that the hit show "24" and other Hollywood productions misrepresent the validity of torture in obtaining reliable information. She has started an organization "Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International." The website is tassc.org. I would encourage you to to there and check it out and even contribute...

I will see if she will give me permission to put up the audio of her show on a website. If so I will link to it.
She also has published an account of her torture:Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey From Torture To Truth (Paperback). I will have a review up of this book when I am done reading it. Here is a link to a review from salon.com (subscription may be required): "The Blindfold's Eyes" by Dianna Ortiz