Where was GOD?

The Blindfold's Eyes My Journey from Torture to Truth Sister Dianna Ortiz with Patricia Davis Orbis Books, $25, 480 pp.

In 1989, two years into a stint as a missionary teacher in Guatemala, Dianna Ortiz--an Ursuline sister from New Mexico--was abducted by Guatemalan security forces. For a horrific twenty-four hours, she was repeatedly raped, beaten, and burned more than a hundred times with cigarettes. Worse, she was forced to participate in the torture of another woman, holding a machete handle as her torturer plunged the blade into the woman's body.

The next day, Ortiz escaped, but not before her ordeal took another sinister twist. A man called Alejandro came to release her from her cell, speaking English well and Spanish badly. He mentioned "a friend at the U.S. embassy." Was he an American? Did the U.S. government have some connection to Ortiz's torture?

Had she died, Ortiz would have joined the list of church workers martyred in Central America, and have been counted among the 200,000 murdered (most by the military) in Guatemala's brutal, thirty-six-year civil war. Instead, she lived to discover that surviving torture is often more painful than the torture itself.

Ortiz suffered severe posttraumatic stress in the years after her abduction. Initially, she remembered little of her life before the torture. Family members and Ursuline sisters sought to comfort her; she did not recognize them. Pregnant by the rape, she had an abortion. This only compounded her pain as she became, in her own eyes, as evil as her torturers.

Those expecting a gory account of torture won't find it here. Neither will they find the poetry of torture accounts like Argentine writer Jacobo Timmerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. Still, The Blindfold's Eyes chronicles Ortiz's two powerfully linked struggles: one to find psychological and emotional healing, the other to pursue truth and bring her torturers to justice.

As often as these efforts sustained each other, they clashed. Feelings of shame kept Ortiz from immediately acknowledging her rape, so she later lacked forensic evidence to prove that it had happened. When lawyers and government investigators questioned her, she often suffered debilitating flashbacks that seemed to erode her progress in emotional recovery. Many torture victims face this poignant dilemma. Could she heal enough to bring her torturers to justice? Would she ever heal if they were not?

To her credit but at her own emotional expense, Ortiz pursued her case, persevering through long, largely fruitless proceedings by the Guatemalan government, the U.S. embassy, State Department, and Justice Department. These institutions viewed her case with varying degrees of skepticism as they sought to avoid the political and public-relations nightmare it entailed. Finally, the Organization of American States issued a report in 1997 finding her claims of torture highly credible.

Nearly five hundred pages, the book has the feel of a documentary film, complete with voice-over narration. Excerpts of journal entries and letters are interwoven with Ortiz's recollections. Friends reconstruct events and help tell pieces of the story obscured by Ortiz's amnesia. Declassified cables from the U.S. embassy and State Department, speeches, and press announcements are interspersed with news summaries and Ortiz's analysis of these representations. At times the writing reads like a legal argument, at other times like a therapeutic recovery manual. Bursts of literary grace do shine through, especially in Ortiz's vivid descriptions of her emotional state or mental outlook.

Ortiz makes a case for how many of her reactions were typical of torture victims: she frequently washed with bleach, broke down while testifying, and considered suicide. (Some of her experiences can tax a reader's patience. When some fellow Ursulines wondered why, after months of treatment, Ortiz couldn't just "get over it," I could sympathize.) Understandably, Ortiz initially lacked perspective on her situation, and it is a relief when she acquires more as the story unfolds. "Not everyone reacts to torture like I did," she writes in the epilogue. As a college teacher told her, Ortiz was a "fragile" person to begin with. Typical as her responses were--nightmares, amnesia, feelings of guilt and shame--Ortiz's reaction seemed particularly severe.

Her story, however, illustrates how torture works and underscores how differently it can affect individuals. This is because more than physical injury, the lasting effects of torture come from how it shatters one's most basic assumptions about oneself and one's sense of the world. Ortiz had specific beliefs that gave her torture its unique devastations. She was a person who had not worn seatbelts because of a "naive" belief in God's protection, but where was God's protection in her cell? The shock of realizing what she and others were capable of left her paralyzed. As a religious, her identity suffered a particularly strong blow. After stabbing "The Woman" and having an abortion, she was filled with guilt and a loss of identity. "How could a Catholic nun commit such acts?" she asks.

Her ties with others, particularly the Ursulines, were also damaged. Sensing their frustration and fearing their rejection should they discover her abortion, Ortiz took a leave of absence from the community.

Ortiz began to heal at a treatment center for torture survivors in Chicago, and the book gets better as Ortiz gets stronger. She became a prominent activist, working with the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission in Washington, D.C. She founded her own organization, the Torture Abolition and Survivors Coalition. Legal matters also occupy the second half of the book, in particular Ortiz's quest to get the U.S. government to divulge what it knew about her torture. "Who is Alejandro?" she asks again and again. What was someone with ties to the U.S. embassy doing in her torture cell?

After examining thousands of pages of documents, Ortiz contends the U.S. government covered up its knowledge of and possible involvement in her abduction, thereby preventing her from bringing her torturers to justice. Through Ortiz's work and that of others like her friend Jennifer Harbury, an American lawyer whose husband (a guerrilla fighter) was killed by the Guatemalan military, much has surfaced about U.S. intelligence and its ties to torturers. In 1999, a UN truth commission in Guatemala found that the U.S. government, through covert operations and the CIA, lent direct and indirect support to Guatemalan torturers and mass murderers.

Throughout the book, it is clear that Ortiz is torn by an intense need, typical of torture victims, to be believed, and a fear that as in torture her words will betray her. As a story of personal healing and legal pursuit, these deep emotions are at the center of her struggle. They define The Blindfold's Eyes.

Suzanne Travers covers immigration for the Herald-News of Paterson, New Jersey, and teaches Latin American politics at Rutgers University-Newark.