The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth

A thousand Thankyou's to the Author for writing this Book. I had picked this up at the local library as I walking around the recent book arrival section. This was book was so helpful to me on a spiritual/religious level and I appreciated the sharing of the deep personal struggle and strategies to cope with Post Traumatic Stress. From a Religious p/o/v I thought this was awesome as it introduced me to completey new ways of seeing meeting God. It was also the first book that I have read on the experinces of the church in Guatemala.Although I have seen the documentary " Finding Dominga" at a retreat for PeaceMakers. I had also never read any of the works of the mentioned Poets at the vigil in Washington and now have them on my reading list. Thanks so much for sharing the journey .

I first read Sister Dianna's memoir when it came out in October 2002, but found her account of her kidnapping, torture, and rape in Guatemala (not to mention the psychological and social after-effects she's endured) simply too troubling to review at the time. I just reread it, and only now am able to get beyond the pain to touch base with what I think is the book's real message.Sister Dianna never softpedals either the brutality to which humans can sink nor the horrifying scars such brutality leaves on victims. She and thousands like her have been wounded for life by the ill-treatment they suffered. To look at Sister's photograph on the book's cover is to see a pain in her eyes that will probably never leave her. But she also leaves room for hope and redemption: a hope and redemption, granted, that are ambiguous and sometimes desperate, but nonetheless solidly real for being so unromanticized. She recognizes that what was taken from her during her brutalization can never be returned. Accounts will never be balanced. But as she writes at book's end, "What I had to learn is that math is not enough. You have to take into account the unexpected. As Graham Greene said, 'Life is absurd. Therefore, there is always hope.'" Not hope for a flashy divine intervention that makes everything right, but for a more solid, more redemptive healing: "I have forgiven God for not working some dramatic miracle. I've learned that God was working a quiet miracle all along, healing me through other people. I still have the horrible past with me--I carry it in my memory and in my skin and I always will--but laid over it, like new skin over a wound, is a newer past, a past of caring and love."I thank God for people like Dianna Ortiz, whose life reminds us that there is great strength in fragility.

A very difficult read because each page keeps the long lasting effects of torture ever present. And yet just as present was her determination to not let the torturers win. The book was long and a bit tedious at times, but I thought this served to state well the terribleness of torture. At the end of the book, Dianna said she has an artistic bent. That showed through in her writing sytle, which I truly appreciated.

This book by and about Dianna Ortiz, and her struggle for healing and justice is a mosaic of one woman's courage and resilience against a crushing backdrop of shameful torture of thousands of innocents in Guatemala. Her torture was motivated, not only by the sadistic cruelty of a few monsters, but also was part of a deliberately chosen pattern of social and political repression by the governments of Guatemala, abetted by representatives of the United States Government. The genius of the book is the way the author allows the reader into her life, and the workings of her mind as she struggles to overcome the truama of her ordeal. She gives us priviledged information about herself and the effects fo her torture on her family, friends, and her religious community. The testimony of a torture survivor and the recovery of her human dignity is a story worth reading for its own sake. Dianna Ortiz's book, The Blindfold's Eyes offers more.Her story transcends her personal experience and serves as a window into the historical dimension of our foreign policy in Guatemala. In the light of Sister Ortiz's story, decent Americans will come to question how much human incense, (literally), are we willing to burn at the altar of National Security ? This book made me angry. It made me cry. It also left me with a lot of questions. In the end this book gave me permission to hold on to a fragile hope for a world seemingly able to devise the most heinous methods to terrorize the spirit of the human person.