Jon Cortina

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Jon Cortina Garaigorta SJ (born December 8, 1934 in Bilbao , † December 12, 2005 in Guatemala City ) was a Spanish - Salvadoran Jesuit and human rights activist .

Life

Cortina came from a Basque family. In 1953 he entered the Jesuit order, in 1955 he went to El Salvador for the first time. He studied philosophy and theology at the Philosophical-Theological University of Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt am Main and engineering in Madrid . In 1968 he was ordained a priest . 1973 Cortina was in Engineering with a thesis on seismic movements in El Salvador doctorate . In 1974 he became a professor of engineering at the Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas” (UCA) in San Salvador .

Cortina got involved in El Salvador for the construction of wells, roads and bridges. In 1977, after the murder of his brother Rutilio Grande, he became a pastor in his parish Aguilares . In the 1980s he became a pastor in a rural community in Guarjila ( Chalatenango Department ) without giving up his teaching activities. When the Salvadoran military carried out a massacre of the Jesuit liberation theologians employed at the UCA and their domestic workers on November 16, 1989 , Cortina - like his colleague Jon Sobrino - survived by chance because he was in his community. The media initially assumed that he had also been among the murdered; On the way back to San Salvador, Cortina heard how he was mentioned on the radio among the victims of the massacre. Cortina did not leave El Salvador after the massacre and continued to be pastor in Guarjila.

In 1994 he founded the human rights organization Asociación Pro Búsqueda de Niñas y Niños Desaparecidos (Association for the Search for Disappeared Children), which was dedicated to the search for missing, orphaned and illegally adopted children in the wake of the Salvadoran civil war . Cortina started the initiative because, in his opinion , the Truth Commission set up by the United Nations after the war had only inadequately addressed this matter. In 2004, Cortina testified in a trial for the murder of Óscar Romero in Fresno , California .

On November 24, 2005, Jon Cortina suffered a stroke in Guatemala City, where he was attending a conference. Lying in a coma, he was admitted to the Nuestra Santísima Señora del Pilar hospital, where he died on December 12th.

Award

Web links

  • Tom Gibb: Finding Leticia . BBC report (English) on the work of Pro Búsqueda , October 14, 2000. Accessed January 19, 2011.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Phil Davison: Fr Jon Cortina, Searcher for Missing Children . In: The Independent , December 15, 2005. Retrieved January 19, 2011.
  2. ↑ a b Ramy Ramos: Jon Cortina, el cura comprometido . In: Revista Fusion , April 2001. Retrieved January 19, 2011.
  3. ↑ Testimony. María Julia Hernández and Jon Cortina SJ at the trial for the assassination of Archbishop Romero in a US court. In: Klaus Hagedorn (Ed.): Oscar Romero. Integrated - between death and life. BIS-Verlag, Oldenburg 2006, pp. 67-74.
personal data
SURNAME Cortina, Jon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cortina Garaigorta, Jon (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish-Salvadoran Jesuit and human rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Bilbao , Spain
DATE OF DEATH December 12, 2005
Place of death Guatemala City , Guatemala