Computers and the Making and Unmaking of Truth in Post-Pinochet Chile

In the 1990s, the Chilean government formed a team of forensic anthropologists to identify the bodies of those killed by the Chilean military and placed in anonymous mass graves during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990). At a time before DNA analysis was possible, anthropologists used a combination of forensic science and computer technology – such as digitally superimposing transparent images of recovered skulls on photographs of known victims, and through their work identified 96 bodies exhumed from the anonymous mass grave known as Patio 29. In the process, Patio 29 emerged as an important historical site for Chilean memory. The identifications increased public knowledge of the crimes committed during the Pinochet dictatorship and provided a sense of closure to the victim’s family members. However, scientific certainty soon became government error. In 2006, the Chilean government announced that the anthropologists had mistakenly identified eight bodies exhumed from Patio 29. Suddenly the expertise of the anthropologists, and the physical recognition techniques they used, became the subject of national debate. The government eventually informed 48 of the 96 families with loved ones exhumed from Patio 29 that they had received the wrong bodies. The once stable facts that had been created by the forensic scientists and their computers had come undone. The Patio 29 case illustrates the ways in which new forensic uses of science and technology can offer a more precise, complete, or objective view of the past, but also that such methods are contested sites of knowledge production whose credibility is linked to changing political, legal, and scientific contexts. Drawing upon archival research and oral history interviews, this paper traces the history of the computer-based techniques the anthropologists used to make the initial Patio 29 identifications. It then explores how the limitations of this technique have shaped Chilean truth and reconciliation processes.