By Kathleen Kern

I met Dianna Ortiz in 1994 when I spent a summer living in her Washington, D.C., community house. She had been tortured while working as a missionary in Guatemala. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible, and she rarely made eye contact with other people. I wondered whether she would ever be able to function in society again.

I met Hector Mondragon in 2000 during a visit to Colombia and noticed that his hands trembled constantly, even when he was telling jokes. Now a member of the Colombian Mennonite Church, he worked in the late 1970s with oil workers who were protesting the privatization of the state oil company. The Colombian military arrested Hector as a subversive and hung him by his hands in the tropical sun for two days, which resulted in permanent nerve damage.

Both Ortiz and Mondragon were tortured by officers who had received training from the U.S. military and/or intelligence agents. In Ortiz’s case, an American officer supervised the men who gang-raped her and lowered her into a pit filled with wounded men, women and children, corpses and rats.

The photos of fresh-faced young American soldiers torturing and humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners have shocked the American public. Those who experienced the “dirty wars” in Latin America over the last several decades were less shocked. The 1986 report by the El Salvador Human Rights Commission referred to the presence of Americans supervising the torture of political prisoners in that country. The School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., trained hundreds of Latin American officers in methods of suppressing political dissent — including the officer who ordered the torture of Mondragon.

Miles Schuman, a physician who has worked with torture victims over the years, writes in a May 14 article for the Toronto Globe and Mail that the images of detainees in Abu Ghraib represented a hauntingly familiar pattern of abuse. The black hoods covering the faces of the naked Iraqi prisoners were called la Capuchi in Salvadoran and Guatemalan torture chambers. They helped transform humans into objects.

The Iraqi prisoner strapped in a crucifixion position to a metal bed frame reminded Schuman of the torture experienced by a Chilean patient under Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Referring to the picture of an Iraqi prisoner wired with fake electrodes, he recalls patients tortured with real electrodes and notes that a 1983 CIA manual used in Honduras advises: “The threat to inflict pain triggers fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain.”

“The very act of photographing those tortured at Abu Ghraib to humiliate and silence parallels the experience of . . . Sister Dianna Ortiz,” Schuman writes. The American officer who witnessed her torture told her that if she told others of his presence among the torturers he would make public the photos and videotapes of the torture that had caused her the most shame.

“From my experience as a physician,” writes Schuman, “the Abu Ghraib images are not an exception to the rules. They represent the rules, I believe, by which the U.S. government and military exercise power over a non-servile population.”

He concludes his Globe and Mail article with a quotation that crystallizes the message of torturers to their victims: “ ‘Scream. Scream as much as you like. It doesn’t matter. No one is listening. No one will ever hear you.  No one will ever know.’ The torturer, like the state sponsoring him, depends upon the obscurity of the victim and the silence of witnesses to continue his crimes.

“We are all witnesses now.”