Died: February 19, 2021.
DIANNA Ortiz, who has died of cancer aged 62, was an American Roman Catholic nun who went to Guatemala as a missionary during a decade of US-backed wars in Central America – and went through a shocking ordeal that made headlines around the world.
In 1989, she was abducted by a Guatemalan security force, whose members gang-raped and tortured her for 24 hours. Her back was pockmarked with more than 100 cigarette burns and she later had a termination after discovering that the attack had left her pregnant. She was also dangled over a pit of corpses – “some decapitated, all caked with blood,” she recalled – and forced to kill another woman with a macheté.