| They force Ortiz, who entered the novitiate at the age of 17, to jerk them off and perform oral sex. They hurt her in other ways she won't describe. (The most chilling line in the book is in a different section, where Ortiz, casually explaining her fear of dogs, says, "Dogs were used in my torture in a way that was too horrible to share with anyone. Even now, I don't talk about that part of the torture.") And they put her in a pit of dying and dead people who've already been tortured -- including children. Most damaging of all, they position Ortiz's hands around a machete and force the machete, in her hands, into another torture victim, murdering the woman. *snip* But in the middle of Dianna Ortiz's torture, something distinctly inimical to torture happens. While her tormentors take a break, she finds herself alone in a room with a figure curled under a bloodstained sheet. When Dianna pulls back the sheet, there is a woman who "opens her eyes, and they are light brown in the black and blue of her face. Her teeth appear in the crack of her swollen lips. She is trying to smile. I catch a sob in my throat and gently take her hand. Her breasts have been cut, and maggots are crawling in them." The woman asks Dianna's name, and says "Dianna, be strong." They hold hands. "For what seems like hours, we hold on to each other." |
| ......Chief among them in Guatemala was that you had the U.S. government presenting a very rosy picture of what was taking place there. The U.S. actually defended the Guatemalan government. There's a moment in the book when Ronald Reagan meets with [former president] General Rios Montt. Reagan described Montt as this man of great personal integrity at the same moment that Montt's elite group of soldiers was marching off to kill an entire village. Most of the people were buried alive in the village well. Children were killed by being grabbed by their ankles and slammed against walls, women were raped over the course of three days. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan told the press that Rios Montt was committed to democracy and was receiving a bum rap. This is something else that continued during the Reagan administration: You had human rights organizations trying to tell the world what was happening and their accounts were being refuted. We now know that the U.S. government knew full well the extent of the violence and who was responsible for it. |
| The relationship began early. Recently declassified C.I.A. documents confirm that the C.I.A. engineered the 1954 coup that toppled the Democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman-and led to decades of military led governments. The documents included instructions on how to assassinate ten people in a conference room. The U.S. has trained more than sixteen hundred Guatemalan military personnel at the U.S. Army School of the Americas now in Ft. Benning, Georgia. In September 1996, the Pentagon released seven S.O.A. training manuals that were used in the 1980s to teach torture, extortion and murder. A Defense Intelligence Agency biographical sketch from 1967, when the S.O.A. was based in Ft. Gulick, Panama, stated that Guatemala's future defense minister, Hector Gramajo, studied counterinsurgency techniques. And in 1991 he gave the school's commencement address. Public disclosure of intelligence concerning human rights abuses in Guatemala remains rare. After Guatemalan guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Vel Esquez disappeared and was tortured by the military in 1992, for three years U.S. officials told his wife, Harvard-educated lawyer Jennifer Harbury, that they had no information about him. But Harbury obtained a Defense Intelligence Agency document that said the U.S. Embassy officials in Guatemala were told of Bamaca's death in 1993. And in the spring of 1995, Congressman Robert Torricelli said that a Guatemalan officer, an S.O.A. graduate on the C.I.A. payroll, had been involved in Bamaca's execution. |
