The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth by Dianna Ortiz (Marknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002)

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In Sister Dianna Ortiz’s The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, an Hispanic nun from the U.S. is kidnapped and tortured by Guatemalan army officers with a U.S. citizen named “Alejandro” apparently in charge. This very long, absorbing memoir attempts, among other things, to understand who the individuals (especially Alejandro) are, and, crucially, what Alejandro’s relation to the United States government is. 

But Blindfold’s Eyes is much more than a “who is Alejandro?” political mystery, important as that endeavor is. Indeed, Blindfold’s Eyes might be one of the best accounts ever provided of the psychological impact and aftereffects of torture. Some torture victims end up committing suicide because torture often eviscerates one’s trust in life. Also, it continues traumatizing the victim for years. Ortiz to this day sleeps with lights on and dreads the onset of night and sleep because flashbacks of her torture and torturers recur then, as well as the screams of Guatemalans being tortured within earshot. She jumps when someone gets close to her unexpectedly. Nor can she stand individuals staring at her. Climactically, she “inherits” a shaving razor from another female torture victim and keeps it under her pillow or otherwise close by. At one point, several years after her November 1989 torture, she cut her wrists. During the numerous interviews and conference speeches and in meetings with U.S. political officials, Ortiz is virtually forced to re-experience flashbacks of her torture and often breaks down. Yet part of her enormous courage and integrity is that, over the years, she continues to try to discover the identity of her tormentors and the ultimate political or institutional context for her torture. Pursuing this harrowing path, her scope of victims continually enlarges as she becomes more aware of the torture and massacre of hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans carried out by Guatemalan “security” or army forces over decades. 

After being burned on her back 111 times by cigarettes no matter what answer she gave to questioning, being gang-raped by 3 Guatemalans, hung by ropes naked over a lime-covered pit of dead and dying, groaning men, women, and children, and having rats dropped on her head, her faith gets ravaged. Further, the rapes led to her pregnancy. Feeling she would have given birth to “evil,” Ortiz got an abortion. 

Now this is an Ursuline nun who not only has made a vow of chastity and comes from a traditional Catholic New Mexican family, but also has to face the reaction of priests—let alone her order—to getting an abortion (one priest informed another rape-torture nun that her abortion was a mortal sin). She asks where God was when she was being tortured, but gradually feels his presence through the support community she builds, including the courageously persistent Jennifer Harbury whose Guatemalan guerrilla-officer husband, Everardo Bamaca, was captured, tortured, and finally executed by the Guatemalan army, again with Washington’s knowledge, pretense of ignorance, and tacit approval. 

Perhaps Ortiz’s most profound form of psychic self-exploration and networking arises from one of the most horrendous events during the torture. Besides being filmed during the rape from angles that falsely indicate her complicity, Ortiz cuts another woman’s body with a machete guided by a coercive torturer’s hand and fears that she killed her. She attempts to exorcise this diabolical enforcement by giving archetypal status to this woman in her mind and in all her campaigns to shed light on Guatemalan political victims and the officials and institutions complicit in such terrorization. Further, in an act of propitiatory exorcism, Ortiz dedicates Blindfold’s Eyes to her “woman friend.” One of the forces that in fact sustains her sanity and crusade is dedication to that female image. 

 The primary U.S. obstacle to Ortiz’s vindication is the ambassador to Guatemala, Thomas Stroock. His office first became sensitive to Ortiz’s account of her extreme abuse when she mentioned that Alejandro was from the U.S., and that he might have some connection with the State Department. Stroock’s reaction is one of outrage that turns to assailing the basis of Ortiz’s torture, claiming Ortiz was never burned or raped and questioned whether she was or even is a nun. (One State Department official, Lew Anselem, claimed that Ortiz’s burns and bruises resulted from a lesbian sado-masochistic involvement. Anselem also claims that Ortiz kidnapped herself). 

 However, Strooch’s rage conceals complicity. Evidence arises that Stroock played a role in “the secret U.S. support for the Guatemalan army.” Stroock “had supervised the CIA station chief [in Guatemala] and…had access to the assets list.” Further, 74 arms deals from the United States were implemented by Stroock, and some of these weapons were, according to journalist Allan Nairn, “used in the Santiago Atillan Massacre of December 1990.” So, this high-placed U.S. diplomat, according to Ortiz, in effect helped cover-up a U.S.-supported Guatemalan-army genocide against its own people. Documents would later be forthcoming showing that Stroock as ambassador had no intention of doing justice to Ortiz’s case. Ortiz regards Stroock as instrumental in aiding and concealing American involvement in horrific human rights abuses by the Guatemalan government. This, in turn, according to Ortiz, facilitated the extermination of any critics of a brutally repressive regime favorable to U.S. ideological and big-business interests in Guatemala.

Ortiz sums up the cost of this dissembling by the U.S. government through such representatives as Stroock: “…my experience [kidnapping and torture] is a daily occurrence in Guatemala. Six people a week are killed…for political reasons…. The army’s counter-insurgency campaign has left an estimated 200,000 dead and another 45,000 disappeared.... Some 440 Mayan villages were wiped off the map. Hundreds of people vanished. Their mutilated, charred remains are only now beginning to emerge from secret mass graves.” 

“What about the U.S.?,” she aptly asks. “When will the truth be exhumed?”  

Two individuals crucial to moving Ortiz’s narrative from torture to truth are Nairn and Jennifer Harbury. At a conference in Washington in the early 1990s on torture in Guatemala, Nairn’s well-informed revelations about the White House’s complicity accomplished several crucial things for Ortiz— first, it substantiated her certainty that Alejandro was not a figment of her imagination. Second, Nairn’s exposition of Washington’s complicity in destroying the democratically-elected Arbenz regime of 1954 and in aiding the Guatemalan death squads, with CIA lists targeting critics or “enemies” of the new regime and the United Fruit Company, became liberating and energizing for Ortiz. 

Another significant figure in Blindfold’s Eyes is Harbury who was on a personal crusade to save her husband from torture and execution by the Guatemalan army. Harbury contacted Ortiz as part of a campaign to bring together U.S. citizens who have been attacked in Guatemala or have lost relatives there. What makes her decide to join Harbury and further publicize their plight is her determination not to succumb to ongoing terrorization by the Guatemalan army and, most important, not to abandon the many Guatemalan victims whose screams still resound in her mind. 

This decision intensifies the psychological and emotional pressures Ortiz has to confront for years. Ortiz is continually menaced externally and internally. Besides the nihilistic presence of her actual torturers, she is implicitly threatened at one point by a President of Guatemala. Further, Guatemalan agents in dark eyeglasses track her at Washington conferences and press meetings, as well as at a torture-treatment center in Chicago called Su Casa. One day a box filled with dried excrement is left at her doorstep; she also receives threatening phone calls in Spanish from anonymous Guatemalans. She is frequently bullied and vilified by Stroock and several other government agencies during meetings and investigational conferences.  

It is thus not surprising that she considers leaving the Ursulines and keeps her “freedom” razor handy. These experiences comprise an extremely heavy burden for anyone, let alone a nun, to bear. 

If Ambassador Stroock emerges as one of the salient hypocrites in Blindfold’s Eyes, and the mysterious Alejandro (later tentatively identified as one Randy Capister, a CIA operative) still might roam the netherworld of CIA-State Department covert machinations, another major scoundrel is embodied in Guatemala-army Vice Chief of Staff Hector Gramajo, who conducted the scorched-earth policy of the 1980s in Guatemala and under whose tenure Ortiz’s torture occurred. This key senior officer actually published an article in a Harvard journal (the International Review) in which, describing Guatemalan army maneuvers, he wrote: “You needn’t kill everyone to complete the job…. We instituted Civil Affairs, which provides development for seventy percent of the population, while we kill thirty percent.” This “Civil Affairs” plan included, among other atrocities, killing thousands of Guatemalans and annihilating over 600 villages, which, involved murdering babies and decapitating eight-year-old children. 

“Gramajo,” Ortiz states, “was personally in charge of and supervised ‘the 30 percent aspect of the program’.” Asked once if his army had a scorched-earth policy towards regime critics and suspected opponents, he described it as a “scorched-Communist” policy. 

A School of the Americas graduate, Gramajo, after his reign of terror in which his death squads exterminated almost 2,000 civilians and “disappeared” around 500 more, was awarded a scholarship to Harvard by the United States Agency for International Development. 

This powerful, moving memoir is not without flaws. For one thing, Blindfold’s Eyes suffers from insufficient use of dates. Nevertheless, this book provides an unforgettable contribution to the literature of the aftereffects of torture; just as valuable, it also delineates a torture victim who develops the vitality and courage to pursue and expose her torturers to the top levels of two savage governments.

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Donald Gutierrez has published six books and over 80 essays and articles on literary subjects.