William Ford, 72; sought justice after sister killed in El Salvador
NEW YORK - William P. Ford, a former Wall Street lawyer who spent more than two decades seeking to bring high-ranking military officials to justice after his sister and three other American churchwomen were killed in El Salvador's civil war in the 1980s, died Sunday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 72.
The cause was esophageal cancer, his son William Ford III said.
Mr. Ford's efforts eventually led to a $54.6 million liability ruling against two former Salvadoran generals in a 2002 civil trial in Florida, where the generals were living after being granted residence by the United States.
Although the ruling was not directly connected to the killings of Mr. Ford's sister and the other women, it resulted largely from his long and tenacious campaign. The federal court jury found Jose Guillermo Garcia, a former defense minister in El Salvador, and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, a former National Guard commander, liable for lasting injuries suffered by three Salvadoran immigrants to the United States who were tortured under the generals' command.
"We pursued the case, with Bill in the lead," Michael Posner, president of Human Rights First, said Monday. "In an extraordinary way, he went beyond simply grieving the loss of his sister; he became a leading advocate for justice in El Salvador."
Mr. Ford had been an influential figure in the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which in 2004 became Human Rights First.
On the night of Dec. 2, 1980, shortly after the start of El Salvador's civil war, Mr. Ford's sister, Ita, a Maryknoll sister; two other members of the same order, Maura Clarke and Dorothy Kazel; and a lay missionary, Jean Donovan, were abducted, raped, and shot to death. The next day, peasants discovered their bodies beside an isolated road and buried them in a common grave. The van they had been driving when they were stopped at a military checkpoint turned up 20 miles away, burned and gutted.
The killings occurred as the United States was beginning a decadelong, $7 billion aid effort to prevent left-wing guerrillas from coming to power in El Salvador, and the case quickly became the focus of a bitter policy debate about Central America.
"This particular act of barbarism," a 1993 State Department report said, "did more to inflame the debate over El Salvador in the United States than any other single incident."
In 1984, four national guardsmen were convicted of murder in El Salvador and were sentenced to 30 years in prison. After 17 years of silence, the guardsmen said they had acted after receiving "orders from above." Their admissions were made to a delegation from the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, including Mr. Ford.
For years, Mr. Ford lobbied politicians and made speeches, alleging that the Salvadoran government had failed to conduct even a rudimentary investigation into the killings. In 1981, he pressed his case with the US ambassador to El Salvador, Dean Hinton, and the Salvadoran president, Jose Napoleon Duarte.
Mr. Ford also criticized the Reagan administration. The government, he said, "is so obsessed with the East-West confrontation that they are willing to tolerate the murder of American citizens in El Salvador."
The Salvadoran junta had killed more than 30,000 people, he said.
It was an unusual stance for a lawyer who had been on the staff of the New York law firm where Richard M. Nixon and John Mitchell had worked before Nixon became president and Mitchell became attorney general.
Mr. Ford was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on April 28, 1936, the son of William and Mildred O'Beirne Ford. Besides his son William, Mr. Ford leaves his wife of 47 years, Mary Anne (Heyman); another son, John; four daughters, Miriam, Ruth, Elizabeth, and Rebecca; a sister, Irene Coriaty; and eight grandchildren.
