@scott Dettling, You could use replacelist() function in ColdFusion. Here is example based on your sample input provided by you.

<cfscript>
input = "Alertas del Condado: Esto es una prueba. Por favor, ignórelo. Gracias.";
fromChars = "á,é,í,ó,ú,ñ,Á,É,Í,Ó,Ú,Ñ";
toChars   = "a,e,i,o,u,n,A,E,I,O,U,N";
cleaned = ReplaceList(input, fromChars, toChars);
writeOutput(cleaned);
</cfscript>

Note : We can able to resolve this by using Java’s java.text.Normalizer to decompose accented characters and remove the diacritics. But the best way to use replacelist() function in CFML. I hope that help you lot !. Thank you !