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  Wednesday  November 20  2002    12: 18 AM

our tax dollars at work

"The Blindfold's Eyes" by Dianna Ortiz
An American nun who survived the torture chambers of Guatemala describes her ordeal and the fear and guilt that still haunt her.

Dianna Ortiz is one American whose relationship to torture is different. That's because she was tortured in 1989, during a two-year stint in Guatemala as a young, politically unsophisticated nun from a Kentucky convent, teaching children to read in a rural province. She was abducted from a convent garden one morning by a U.S.-trained Guatemalan army captain, a police intelligence officer and their campesino torture temp, and installed in the secret basement of a police training institute called the Politecnica. (This was a regular site for torture conducted on orders of the military high command.) (...)

Ortiz was held for only 24 hours, unlike many other torture victims, whose ordeals last, incredibly, for months or even years. But those 24 hours resulted in a complete loss of memory of everything in her life prior to being tortured. She had to be reintroduced to her own parents, and she still has almost no memory of her childhood, her college years, how she became a nun, or her pre-torture friendships.
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