The Rev. Jon de Cortina, 71; Saved Salvadoran Children
By GINGER THOMPSON
Published: January 9, 2006
The Rev. Jon de Cortina Garaigorta, a Jesuit priest who dedicated the last decade to searching for the missing children of El Salvador's brutal civil war, died in mid-December, officials of his organization said Wednesday. He was 71.
They said the cause was complications of a stroke.
The founder of the independent Association for Missing Children, Father de Cortina is credited with using basic detective work, then later DNA testing, to solve the disappearances of about 310 children.
Sandra Lobo, the coordinator of the group, said it had reunited 178 of those children with their parents. At least 50 of them had been adopted by unsuspecting Americans, she said.
Father de Cortina's mission began in 1992, when the war had ended and the United Nations Truth Commission opened investigations into widespread human rights abuses during the war. In the Chalatenango region, a handful of rural peasants came forward with testimony about how their children had been kidnapped by government troops. That led him to begin his search.
Word of his search spread across the country, bringing hundreds of reports of abducted children, as well as confessions from soldiers. They told him the kidnappings had been meant not only to terrorize supporters of the Marxist rebel group but also to raise money by selling the children to corrupt adoption agencies.
The Salvadoran military publicly acknowledged that families had been separated during the war, but always maintained that its officers had acted on the impulse to save children who had been abandoned or orphaned in fighting that left 75,000 people dead or missing.
''These children were robbed, abducted in the countryside by the military for a variety of motives,'' Father de Cortina said in a 1996 interview with The New York Times after the first few dozen missing children had been found and reunited with their families. ''But we believe that the right to recover their identity, and the right of their families to know the fate of the children they lost, must be fulfilled and respected.''
Born in 1934 in Bilbao, Spain, Father de Cortina joined the Society of Jesus in 1954, moved to El Salvador a year later and was ordained in 1968. He studied philosophy and civil engineering at St. Louis University, in Missouri, and theology in Frankfurt. He later became a professor of seismic engineering at the Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana.
During the war, even after six of his Jesuit colleagues were killed by a secret military unit and Archbishop ?car Arnulfo Romero was assassinated during a Mass, Father de Cortina remained an outspoken critic of the systematic abuses by the Salvadoran military, which had been trained and financed by the United States.
A month before he died, his work in El Salvador was recognized with St. Louis University's highest honor, the Sword of Ignatius Loyola.
''Instead of being frightened by the conflict around him, he became a tireless and articulate advocate for disclosing the atrocities that took place during the war,'' said Lawrence Biondi, president of St. Louis University. ''He was the voice for the voiceless.''
Photo: A boy held Father de Cortina's picture at the funeral on Dec. 16. (Photo by Luis Romero/Associated Press)