ATLANTA (ABP) — Nearly two decades ago, Sister Dianna Ortiz says, Guatemalan security forces abducted her and took her to a clandestine prison where she was brutally gang-raped; burned more than 100 times with cigarettes; forced to cut another woman with a machete; and suspended by her wrists over a pit full of dead and dying men, women and children.
Worse, yet, her torturers documented their brutality through videotape and photographs — with her captors warning they would release the visual evidence to the press if she spoke out about the experience.
“This past has awakened again, both here and now,” Ortiz said of the experience, in remarks prepared for a recent summit of religious leaders in Atlanta. “The smells of burning flesh and decomposing corpses, the mutilated bodies of children, the policeman’s cratered face and button-like eyes devoid of feeling are returning. I have no wish whatsoever to return to that prison in Guatemala; nor do I wish to hearken back to how I felt as I cried to a silent and deaf God. Yet, it all does come back.”
The American Catholic nun went to the Guatemalan highlands in 1987 as a missionary to indigenous Mayan people. What she experienced at the hands of right-wing paramilitary officials — and a fair-skinned accomplice, identified only as “Alejandro,” who she said was obviously an American — in 1989 nearly destroyed her faith.
It wasn’t like that before the torture. Ortiz experienced what she called “the radiant face of God” in the first two years of her missionary work, teaching Mayan children in their own language.
“We are nearly blinded by the glorious colors, shining from heaven’s door,” she wrote. “But now, try to imagine a dark shadow falling across that face of God — eclipsing it, obliterating every sign of it. Hope is gone. Belief is gone. The God you once knew — you once trusted — is dead. Where are the colors now? What colors emanate from a dead God? ‘I will be with you always.’ That was the promise. Where is that promise now? What kind of a place is it where God dies — where trust in self and others die as well?”
Ortiz had been scheduled as a speaker at the summit on torture and United States policy, sponsored by Mercer University, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Evangelicals for Human Rights and a host of other religious organizations. Although unable to attend because she was to testify in a torture trial, Ortiz provided prepared remarks to conference participants.
The kind of crisis of faith and psyche that Ortiz endured is just one of many long-term consequences victims of torture suffer, said Doug Johnson, executive director of the Center for Victims of Torture.
“Whatever we do learn about the impact of torture must be placed in the context of what we know about the impact of intense traumas, and particularly human-induced traumas,” Johnson said. “We’re getting a clear idea that there is a biological effect that is induced by intense traumas — not merely a psychological one.”
For example, even mild forms of torture — forcing victims into stress positions for long periods of time, or sleep deprivation — can have subtle physical side-effects that only manifest themselves years later, Johnson said. And the psychological effects can be not only profound, but long-lasting.
“We know, for example, that survivors of the Holocaust … still have high rates of clinical depression and suicide 50 years after the fact,” Johnson said. He noted the sin of torture visits itself on subsequent generations, as well — children and even grandchildren of Holocaust survivors also have higher rates of suicide and depression than the general population.
Johnson’s organization provides psychological treatment to survivors of torture at clinics in Minnesota; Washington, D.C.; Guinea and Sierra Leone. He said some effects of torture are so profound they can fundamentally change its victims’ personalities.
“I had a very gentle, sweet client who was driving an ice-cream truck in the streets of Minneapolis…. He got rear-ended,” Johnson said. “He came out swinging, totally enraged.”
The man, who had been abducted by his torturers in another country and then fled to the United States, later told Johnson the rear-ending caused him to act irrationally because it brought back a flood of bad memories.
“He told me that, when he had been taken in his country, he had been in his car, on the streets of the capital city,” Johnson said. “His abductors crashed into him.”
The man also exhibited another long-term consequence of torture, Johnson said — the inability to complete tasks. “This man was a wealthy businessman in his home country; now he is having difficulty driving an ice-cream truck,” he said.
And the often-stated purpose of torture — to gain information — is almost never achieved by physical or psychological coercion, both Johnson and Ortiz said.
Ortiz, who founded an organization of torture survivors, said simply destroying the victim and his or her community is torture’s true goal.
“Torture is an attempt to obliterate a person’s personality, to turn him or her into a quivering mass of fear, cowering in some corner of the world afraid to look for the dawn,” she said.
“It is not something we, the tortured ‘get over.’ It is something we live with the rest of our days. It is forever strapped to our backs. It constitutes a permanent invasion of our minds and our souls. Someone in uniform; a scream; the smell of a cigarette; the sound of someone whistling; the sight of a dog; the sound of keys rattling; cutting a piece of meat with a knife — any of these may continually threaten a return to that past which walks so closely behind us.”
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