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Victoria Brown

Father Jon de Cortina spoke at the Bolivar House yesterday about how the Salvadoran military kidnapped and sold children.

El Salvadorian Jesuit priest Father Jon de Cortina spoke yesterday at the Bolivar House Center for Latin American Studies.

Several dozen people crowded in to hear de Cortina speak about his organization, Probusqueda, which seeks to reunite Salvadoran families with the children who were taken from by the military in the country’s civil war of the 1980s and early 1990s. Once the military seized children from villages and battlefields, it sold them into adoption.

De Cortina said the military’s motives for kidnapping and selling children were both financial and tactical.

“Our belief is they wanted to terrorize the population,” said de Cortina, “so the military could [be] free to do as they pleased.” He added that, in many cases, kidnapped children were taken to “houses of fattening,” where they were fed well to increase their adoption market value, which was upwards of $18,000 U.S.

Probusqueda made rapid progress upon its inception in August, 1994. By December, 2000, it had received 618 requests from Salvadoran parents who believed that their children were still alive.

The group concluded that 18 children had died since their kidnappings, but, in 120 cases, children were reunited with their families. De Cortina said that 33 such children are still in contact with their birth families.

In most cases, the displaced children’s adoptive families are willing to let their children make contact with their Salvadoran relatives. In fact, many adoptive families travel with the children to meet their birth families.

De Cortina added that, initially, many children were wary of meeting their birth parents because, while in military custody, they had been told that their natural parents had abandoned them on the battlefields, and that the military had in fact rescued them.

“The most persecuted thing in El Salvador is the truth,” de Cortina said.

Probusqueda works by analyzing institutional adoption records, as well as by performing field work, where members comb through Salvadoran villages searching for clues or personal stories of kidnapped children. Probusqueda has received little help from the Salvadoran government and is funded by private and religious donations.

De Cortina bemoans the fact that virtually all of the perpetrators of the kidnappings and child-sales remain unpunished. He cites corruption and fear of witness reprisals as the main factors preventing action.

“Once, we had a judge who said, ‘Yeah, I can give testimony, but what happens to me afterward?’ ” said de Cortina about a potential witness to military offenses.

De Cortina said he rejects those who tell him that his quest to reunite children and persecute the guilty parties should be dropped because the events happened so long ago. “Much is being said of forget and forgive,” de Cortina said. “I really think that to forget is impossible. They are denying us of what happened.”