Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the identification of skeletons exhumed from the General Cemetery in Santiago where the Chilean military buried bodies anonymously during the Pinochet dictatorship. The paper explores how memory of human rights violations shapes the perceived legitimacy of scientific work.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1990s, the Chilean government formed a team of forensic scientists to identify the bodies of those the military killed and buried anonymously during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990). This paper focuses on the 126 skeletons exhumed from one burial site—Patio 29—a lot in the General Cemetery in Santiago where the military buried hundreds of bodies in graves marked N.N. (nomen nescio). Chilean forensic scientists working in the Medical-Legal Institute were able to identify 96 of the skeletons exhumed and provide family members with a sense of closure. However, scientific certainty soon became government error. In 2006, the Chilean government announced that at least 48 of the 96 skeletons had been misidentified. Much of the blame for these errors fell on the shoulders of the female scientists who had conducted the identifications. Critics said the women had been too close to the families of the disappeared to make objective identifications and that their political commitment to finding and identifying the disappeared had caused them to reach beyond the limits of their scientific capability. This paper will explore how the scientists' proximity to memories of Chile's human rights violations shaped the perceived legitimacy of their scientific work; stemmed from the historical context in which the work took place; and formed part of Chile's transition to democracy. The paper will draw from interviews, press accounts, and archival documents.