Remembering Dianna Ortiz: A fierce tenderness

By Johnny Zokovitch

On February 19 five years ago, Sr. Dianna Ortiz, OSU, died. Dianna, both an advocate for and a torture survivor herself, had an indomitable tenderness about her, evident especially in the strength, grace, and courage of her pursuit of the truth of what happened to her and then her commitment to helping other survivors.

As a little girl, Dianna had wanted to be a nun, and at 18, she entered the Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph in Kentucky. A teacher by trade, in 1987 she was sent by her community to Guatemala to teach young Indigenous children. Guatemala was in the midst of a civil war that would ultimately claim 200,000 lives; for the two years Dianna worked there, she was aware of the violence, but felt relatively safe because of her status as a US citizen.

But on November 2, 1989 Dianna was kidnapped by two men from the Guatemalan security forces and taken to a secret prison in Guatemala City. Dianna had been targeted for “subversive activities,” activities like teaching Indigenous children to read and write and study the bible. Her captors repeatedly raped her and burned her with cigarettes, demanding that she give them the names of other Indigenous subversives.

After 24 hours of further brutality, Dianna escaped. Two days later, after her community had found her, she was back in the United States, traumatized to the point of not recognizing family members and haunted by nightmares.

Every step Dianna took for years after her escape was aimed at learning the truth of what happened to her. With her trauma still vivid and alive inside of her years later, she would begin a silent vigil for truth, a hunger strike, just outside the White House in Lafayette Park, where she would sit for 21 hours a day. Many joined her and a campaign of protests and arrests followed, demanding the release of documents about her case.

The US government would eventually reveal the role that CIA agents played in using informers and protecting torturers in Guatemala. Declassified papers revealed that a smear campaign had been concocted by the US embassy and Guatemalan military officials to discredit Dianna. Alongside other survivors, she won a lawsuit against the Guatemalan military commander who oversaw the policy of torture, and an investigation by the Organization of American States backed up her account of her kidnapping and torture.

In so publicly reliving an experience most people, maybe everyone, would prefer to forget, Dianna became a magnet for others who suffered in silence. Repeatedly, other survivors approached her, knowing that here was someone who knew something of what they had experienced, who carried the burden of trauma and humiliation that they too carried. Dianna began to speak to torture survivors from across the world — from Armenia, Ethiopia, Honduras, the Philippines — and eventually she brought together a small group of survivors like herself alongside a handful of individuals committed to human rights to found the first organization of survivors for survivors, operating from the core belief that survivors understand their needs best and must be at the core of decisions about the healing process. This organization, the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC), was founded in 1998, offering the full range of services to meet survivors needs, from medical and psychological to legal, employment mentoring and spiritual.

It is said that trauma and suffering can do one of two things to us. We either become hardened, or we learn, really choose, to soften. We either close off, or we deliberately, intentionally, choose to open up. In starting TASSC, Di chose empathy as her practice of discipleship to Jesus. Everything in her experience would have validated the choice to close up, close off, shut down, disconnect. And like all of us, she could go that way in moments of vulnerability; but she always came back to tenderness, to connection, to compassion. Hers was a fierce tenderness, filled with strength and courage, a fierce tenderness borne out of suffering, that connected her to the suffering of others, that manifested in her an empathy that could walk into the darkest, most terrifying places in herself and reach out her hand to touch those who were cowering, shaking, sobbing in those same places within themselves.

I, like many, experienced Dianna’s tenderness first-hand, when she held me gently after a moment of being insulted and humiliated, telling me that I didn’t deserve what had just happened to me. I saw it in her care of young people finding their way in the world, toward other survivors who were so alone in what they had experienced until they found their way to her, toward colleagues who needed encouragement and affirmation.

But underlying Dianna’s tenderness was a fierceness that emerged whenever injustice showed itself — small or big, personal or systemic, whether fighting the US government on behalf of those who had been violated or standing up for someone in the room whose voice was being ignored during a meeting. Many times, I’d see her draw her face tight, shake her head and speak directly, strongly, with authority, brooking no argument when the dignity of another was being assaulted or neglected.

Despite going through what most of us will never go through, Dianna connected with others over things that all of us experience: dissatisfying work, mean or incompetent bosses, the aggravations of living with others, having a garden plot wrecked by bad weather. She was a light that flickered and sputtered some days but never went out; a light that burst forth like the sun when she smiled and closed her eyes and sung the praises of snow. Or coffee. Or being wrapped in a warm blanket on a cold day.

Dorothy Day once said that the practice of discipleship is “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” An apt way to describe Dianna.

Like Jesus, Dianna knew what it was to hang on a cross. But unlike Jesus, she had to live with the memory of that cross, the trauma of it, for years afterward. What she cultivated in the aftermath of that experience became a fierce tenderness that sought truth from the powerful and healing for the broken. She was, in an image taken from Henri Nouwen, a wounded healer, finding in her own woundedness the tenderness to attend to the wounds of others.  

For me, Dianna is an icon of fierce tenderness, exuding gentleness, hospitality, nonviolence and love. And — for someone whose very self and identity were nearly annihilated by the vicious, reprehensible, inhuman acts of other human beings — she demonstrated a hard-fought-and-won other-centeredness rooted in her own vulnerability, living out a deep respect for all those whose dignity others sought to erase.

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Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of thePax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership atSt. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis. Read more from Johnny at https://johnnyzokovitch.substack.com/.

Cover photo of Dianna by Rick Reinhard