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school of the americas
The American Reckoning
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know US leaders belong there too.
Sep 11, 2025
I have met people who gave me grace in Iran, in Mexico, in Haiti, in Gaza, in Cambodia, in Vietnam. People who understood the difference between ordinary citizens and the governments that rule them. People who offered me kindness when they had every reason not to. That grace stays with me.
As a US citizen and physician, I have lived my life trying to hold onto a sense of responsibility. But what I see now, in Gaza, in Haiti, in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, is the full weight of what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility. It is the shrug that says: Someone else will answer for this, someone else will carry the shame.
The United States cannot keep living in that shrug. We armed, funded, and protected Israel as it has carried out the genocide of the Palestinian people. We have supplied not only weapons but coordination, intelligence, and political cover. We let the American Israel Public Affairs Committee function as the arm of a foreign government, not as a lobbying group. We looked away from the checkpoints, the administrative cruelty, the killing of children. This is our legacy.
But Gaza is not an aberration. It is a mirror held up to the long history of our interventions. We overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, in 1953, not because he was a tyrant but because he dared to nationalize oil. We turned that nation toward dictatorship and decades of repression, then had the arrogance to call it democracy. In Central America, we toppled leaders and propped up death squads. In Chile, we helped usher in the bloody reign of Augusto Pinochet, betraying yet another democratic choice in favor of authoritarian brutality.
We speak of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous ways as if they are foreign to us. They are not. We have assassinated leaders. We have sanctioned extrajudicial killings, calling them “targeted strikes.” We have funded militias and trained torturers. We still carry Guantánamo on our conscience. We are not better than Putin. We are his rival and his mirror.
We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
In Vietnam, we unleashed hell. Entire villages were burned to the ground. At My Lai, US soldiers slaughtered more than 500 unarmed civilians, women, children, elders. It was not an accident, not a one-off. It was part of a culture of violence we exported and excused.
And then there is the School of the Americas, now rebranded as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a US military institution in Panama where we trained some of the worst dictators and death squad leaders in Latin America. The manuals we gave them were explicit: torture, execution, terror as tools of governance. We sowed horror and called it security.
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know we belong there too. For Mossadegh, for Pinochet, for Central America, for My Lai, for every extrajudicial killing and every sanctioned massacre, and most immediately for Gaza, we should be in the dock as well. We should stand in handcuffs, our heads lowered in shame, finally facing the truth of what we have unleashed in the world.
The truth is that our foreign policy has been one long history of intervention, violence, and betrayal of human dignity. We were in Haiti. We were in Iraq. We were in Afghanistan. We have left the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa littered with the bones of our experiments. Always we tell ourselves it was complicated. Always we tell ourselves we meant well. But what we meant was power, and what we left was ruin.
What reparation looks like now is not cash or aid dropped into a void. It is restoring justice. It is ending our culture of nation building and intervention, and replacing it with support for people, families, language, culture, dignity, and jurisprudence. It is standing against genocide, no matter who commits it. It is admitting that our strength lies not in military power but in whether we can build schools instead of prisons, communities instead of empires.
This is not just a populist opinion. It is a moral imperative. We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
I am a doctor. My oath is to heal, to do no harm. But as a citizen, I see harm everywhere our government touches. We cannot keep pretending that this is someone else’s crime, someone else’s burden. This is ours.
The reckoning will not wait forever. The question is whether we face it with honesty now, or whether we let it destroy us later.
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Sister Dianna Ortiz--US Nun Who Survived Guatemala Torture and Became Human Rights Champion--Dies at 62
"Dianna walked through the very worst of hell and came out with love... Her legacy is a witness to nonviolence and to love in the face of evil and to redemption. That's her legacy, to teach us that that's possible."
Feb 20, 2021
Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico whose 1989 abduction, rape, and torture by U.S.-backed Guatemalan forces led to her becoming an outspoken peace, human rights, and anti-torture activist, died Friday in Washington, D.C. at the age of 62 after battling cancer.
"I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth. I am still waiting."
--Sister Dianna Ortiz
Ortiz--who wanted to be a nun since she was a little girl--joined the Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph, part of a 400-year-old Roman Catholic order dedicated to the education of girls and the care of the sick and needy, when she was still a teenager. She taught kindergarten for a decade before moving to Guatemala in 1987 at the age of 28.
Years later Ortiz explained that she wanted "to teach young indigenous children to read and write... and to understand the Bible in their culture."
It was dangerous work at a dangerous time. Guatemala was ravaged by decades of civil war that followed a 1954 CIA coup deposing Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected progressive president. U.S.-backed right-wing military dictatorships, some of which perpetrated genocidal violence against the country's Mayan population, followed.
The 36-year civil war left over 200,000 Guatemalans dead, more than 600 villages destroyed, and countless people--mostly Mayan campesinos--displaced.
\u201cSister Dianna Ortiz committed her life to advocating for human rights and defending justice, freedom and human dignity. Her dedication, compassion and bravery will be greatly missed.\nhttps://t.co/6lPoTH7EMZ\u201d— Amnesty International USA (@Amnesty International USA) 1613867615
"Every family in San Miguel had people who had been tortured, disappeared, or killed," Mary Elizabeth Ballard, an Ursuline sister who had arrived in Guatemala a year before Ortiz, told the literary magazine Agni in a 1998 interview. "No family was untouched."
By early 1989 Ortiz was receiving threatening letters imploring her to leave Guatemala. She eventually did depart, traveling to the Urusline motherhouse in Kentucky. But only for a short while.
"She had a great love for the Guatemalans," explained Luisa Bickett, another Ursuline sister who worked in San Miguel.
"I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.'"
--Ortiz
Ortiz returned to Guatemala in September 1989. By the following month, she was receiving death threats. For her safety, Ortiz decided to seek refuge at Posada de Belen, a convent and religious retreat 170 miles (270 km) from San Miguel in Antigua.
On November 2, Ortiz was reading in the convent's garden when her life was forever changed. In an interview with Kerry Kennedy, she recalled that:
I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.' I turned to see the morning sunlight glinting off a gun held by a man who had threatened me once before on the street. He and his partner forced me onto a bus, then into a police car where they blindfolded me.
We came to a building and they led me down some stairs. They left me in a dark cell, where I listened to the cries of a man and woman being tortured. When the men returned, they accused me of being a guerrilla and began interrogating me. For every answer I gave them, they burned my back or my chest with cigarettes. Afterwards, they gang-raped me repeatedly.
Ortiz was then moved to another room with another woman prisoner. Some men returned with a video camera and a machete, which Ortiz thought would be used to torture her. Instead, she says she was forced to kill the other woman.
"What I remember is blood gushing, spurting like a water fountain... and my cries lost in the cries of the woman," she recalled. Her captors then threatened to release video of her attacking the woman if she refused to cooperate. Then:
I was lowered into a pit full of bodies--bodies of children, men, and women, some decapitated, all caked with blood. A few were still alive. I could hear them moaning... A stench of decay rose from the pits. Rats swarmed over the bodies... I passed out and when I came to I was lying on the ground beside the pit, rats all over me.
Ortiz said that a North American man her torturers called "Alejandro" was present during her ordeal. When he realized she was an American, he helped her get dressed and drove her away while apologizing. "He said he was... working to liberate [Guatemala] from communism," Ortiz recalled.
\u201cOur statement on the death of our beloved friend & colleague, Dianna Ortiz, OSU. Our heartbreak & grief are only tempered by our gratitude & love for all Dianna has been for us, & for the rest and peace that she now has. #DiannaOrtiz https://t.co/n260jDVlp4\u201d— Pax Christi USA (@Pax Christi USA) 1613746400
Darleen Chmielewski, a Franciscan nun who was one of the first people to see Ortiz after her escape, described her friend as in "a state of shock." The two women went to the home of the the Vatican representative in Guatemala City, who had offered Ortiz refuge.
"Diana wanted to take a bath," Chmielewski recalled. "I helped her wash and saw all the cigarette burns... she just cried and took baths."
Two days later, Ortiz was back in the United States. "After escaping from my torturers, I returned home to New Mexico so traumatized that I recognized no one, not even my parents," she told Kennedy. "I had virtually no memory of my life before my abduction; the only piece of my identity that remained was that I was a woman who was raped and forced to torture and murder another human being."
Ortiz also felt forced to do something unimaginable for many nuns. "I got pregnant as a result of the multiple gang rapes," she told Kennedy. "Unable to carry within me... what I could only view as a monster, I turned to someone for assistance and I destroyed that life."
"I felt I had no choice," explained Ortiz. "If I had had to grow within me what the torturers left me I would have died."
\u201cI first met Sr. Dianna Ortiz when she was on hunger strike in front of the Clinton White House in 1995. I was later honored to know her & to support her quest for justice. It is long past due for her torturers to be held accountable & CIA docs declassified https://t.co/pZ6MHw3kMz\u201d— jeremy scahill (@jeremy scahill) 1613863159
Ortiz's torment continued as she sought--and was denied--justice. U.S. embassy officials accused her of staging her abduction in a bid to thwart the George H.W. Bush administration's military aid to Guatemala. Cigarette burns--111 of them, according to a U.S. doctor who examined her--told a different story.
"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads--my torturers themselves."
--Ortiz
In a bizarre twist, Guatemalan officials claimed Ortiz faked her kidnapping to cover up a violent lesbian affair, a rumor subsequently spread by U.S. officials. Previously, the Reagan administration had undertaken a similar effort to discredit another Ursuline nun, Dorothy Kazel of Cleveland, Ohio, who along with three other American churchwomen was kidnapped, raped, and executed in El Salvador by U.S.-backed troops in 1980.
Even though she was back in the relative safety of the United States, Ortiz received menacing phone calls and anonymous packages, one containing a dead mouse wrapped in a Guatemalan flag. However, undaunted, she made three trips to Guatemala to testify against the government there.
Ortiz tasted victory, albeit of a largely symbolic nature, in April 1995, when a federal judge in Boston ordered Gen. Hector Gramajo, the Guatemalan defense minister who had tried to discredit Ortiz, to pay her and eight other torture victims a combined $47.5 million.
In 1996 Ortiz held a five-week fasting vigil in front of the White House, where she demanded that the U.S. government declassify all documents about human rights abuses in Guatemala since the 1954 coup. Hillary Clinton, then first lady, invited Ortiz to her office. During their meeting, Clinton did not rule out the possibility that "Alejandro" was a past or current U.S. operative.
Ortiz's relentless pursuit of justice eventually compelled the United States to declassify long-secret documents revealing details of U.S. cooperation with Guatemalan security forces before, during, and after the time of her abduction, including an admission that the U.S. embassy was in contact with members of a death squad.
The documents also showed that Gen. Gramajo had been trained in counterinsurgency tactics at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), where military and police officials from Latin American allies--many of them dictatorships--were instructed in counterinsurgency and democracy suppression using course manuals that advocated the torture and execution of civilians.
\u201cSr Dianna Ortiz, Presente With deep sadness on your passing, we celebrate your life and witness for peace and justice, to end torture, and to hold the US government accountable. Our solidarity with @PaxChristiUSA @TASSCintl https://t.co/wz1Xt9MtCu\u201d— SOAWatch (@SOAWatch) 1613832975
The files also proved that the U.S. was supporting Guatemalan forces guilty of perpetrating genocide. In 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. role in the bloodshed, terror, and repression.
"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads--my torturers themselves," Ortiz later wrote. "The United States was the Guatemalan army's partner in a covert war against a small opposition force, a war the United Nations would later declare genocidal."
Ortiz's suffering left her with an acute awareness of human rights issues and a desire to work in service of those rights. In 1998 she founded Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), and in 2002 published The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. In the 2000s Ortiz was a vocal opponent of the George W. Bush's torture program in the so-called War on Terror.
Last year, she was named deputy director of Pax Christi USA, part of an international Catholic peace movement.
\u201c\u201cThe Blindfold\u2019s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth\u201d was my intro to international human rights abuses & how often the U.S gov & the CIA are part of the story (or responsible). Thank you for sharing your pain & fighting for others, descansa en paz Sister Dianna Ortiz.\u201d— Catalina Cruz, Esq. (@Catalina Cruz, Esq.) 1613959295
Recently, Ortiz worked for nuclear disarmament and led Pax Christi's work commemorating the 75th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
As for her recovery, Ortiz wrote in The Blindfold's Eyes that despite years of therapy at Chicago's Marjorie Kovler Center for torture survivors, "no one ever fully recovers" from torture, "not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."
Ortiz never not stopped searching for the whole truth of what happened to her back in 1989.
"No one ever fully recovers, not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."
--Ortiz
"I demand the right to a future built on truth and justice," she told Kennedy. "My torturers were never brought to justice. It is possible that, individually, they will never be identified or apprehended. But I cannot resign myself to this fact and move on. I have a responsibility to the people of Guatemala and to the people of the world to insist on accountability where it is possible."
"I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth," said Ortiz. "I am still waiting."
Ursuline Sister Larraine Lauter was with Ortiz when she passed away on Friday. Lauter called her friend "unfailingly good."
"Dianna walked through the very worst of hell and came out with love," she told the Catholic Standard. "It's hard to believe that bad things happen to good nuns, but they do. Her legacy is for us to be nonviolent. Her legacy is a witness to nonviolence and to love in the face of evil and to redemption. That's her legacy, to teach us that that's possible."
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Former US-Backed Salvadoran Colonel Sentenced by Spanish Court to 133 Years in Prison for 1989 Jesuit Massacre
Col. Inocente Orlando Montano led an elite U.S.-trained army unit that massacred six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter during El Salvador's 12-year civil war.
Sep 14, 2020
A Spanish court last week sentenced a former U.S.-backed Salvadoran army colonel and government official to 133 years in prison for the murder of five Spanish Jesuit priests during the Central American country's civil war.
The Guardian reports Inocente Orlando Montano, 77, was found guilty of "terrorist murder" by Spain's highest criminal court, the Audiencia Nacional, in Madrid on Friday. Montano also served as El Salvador's vice-minister of public security at the time of the 1989 Jesuit massacre.
\u201cSOA graduate Inocente Montano, former Minister of Security of El Salvador, was found guilty today & sentenced to 133 years by a Spanish court for the Nov 1989 murders of the Jesuit priests in El Salvador. https://t.co/LYBPxVn0nN\u201d— SOAWatch (@SOAWatch) 1599848270
The five Spanish priests, along with one Salvadoran Jesuit priest, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter, were murdered on November 16, 1989 by members of the elite Atlacatl Battalion, which was created, armed, trained, and funded by the United States.
According to a report by El Salvador's postwar United Nations Truth Commission, Atlacatl troops disguised as rebels rounded up five of the six priests--university rector Ignacio Ellacuria Beas Coechea, vice-rector Ignacio Martin-Baro, social sciences dean Segundo Montes, Juan Ramon Moreno, and Amando Lopez--before ordering them to lie face-down on the ground in a garden where they were executed.
The attackers then discovered Father Joaquin Lopez y Lopez and killed him too, along with housekeeper Julia Elba Ramos and her 15-year-old daughter Celina Ramos.
\u201c'I Miss Them, Always': A Witness Recounts El Salvador's 1989 Jesuit Massacre https://t.co/atWoL4qcZr\u201d— Luis Herr\u00e1n (@Luis Herr\u00e1n) 1599927737
The Spanish court could not convict Montano for murdering Lopez, Ramos, or her daughter because his extradition to Spain under the legal concept of universal jurisdiction--which posits that national courts may prosecute serious human rights crimes regardless of where they occur--did not apply to those cases.
Almudena Bernabeu, a Spanish human rights lawyer and member of the prosecution team in the Montano case, said the verdict shows the importance of universal jurisction.
"It doesn't really matter if 30 years have passed, the pain of the relatives carries on," she said. "I think people forget how important these active efforts are to formalize and acknowledge that someone's son was tortured or someone's brother was executed."
Hailed by U.S. officials as "the pride of the United States military team in El Salvador," the unit Montano led committed some of the most horrific massacres of the 12-year Salvadoran Civil War. Atlacatl officers and troops--many of them trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA)--carried out mass rape and the wholesale murder of more than 900 villagers, mostly women, children, and the elderly, at El Mozote on December 11, 1981, to name but one of its many crimes.
According to a Truth Commission report, 26 Salvadoran soldiers were involved in the Jesuit massacre. Of these, 19 were SOA graduates, including Gen. Juan Rafael Bustillo and three others soldiers believed to be responsible for the 1989 torture, rape, and murder of French Medecins Sans Frontieres nurse Madeleine Lagadec.
Elliott Abrams, the Reagan administration's "death squad ambassador" in Central America who is now the Trump administration's special representative for Iran and Venezuela, hailed the U.S. record in El Salvador as "one of fabulous achievement." More than 70,000 men, women, and children died during the Salvadoran Civil War. The Truth Commission investigation concluded that 85% of the more than 22,000 atrocities that were reported during the war were committed by the U.S.-backed military regime and associated forces.
Many of the perpetrators of war crimes and other human rights atrocities--including Montano--found refuge in the United States. Montano was jailed in the U.S. for immigration fraud and perjury before he was extradited to Spain in 2017.
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