Twelve years after Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet left power, forensics experts are using advanced DNA technology to identify remains of those who disappeared under his 17-year rule.
Pinochet's crackdown on leftist dissidents left a toll of 2,095 dead and another 1,102 missing, according to a government report in the early 1990s.
Chile's Medical Legal Service, the government's forensics department, said today it has identified nine bodies in the past nine months using the most advanced technology available, which involves extracting DNA samples from bone fragments and comparing them to a data bank of DNA from living relatives.
"We have had nine identifications with this method, which according to international standards, is considered a success," Dr Jorge Rodriguez, director of the morgue, told reporters.
A total of 207 of the victims of abductions, all of whom were buried in clandestine graves throughout the country between 1973 and 1990, have been identified to date, mostly by other methods.
Another 102 bodies have been found but not identified.
Years of striving to document the human rights abuses committed under Pinochet's rule has given Chile's forensics staff an expertise uncommon in the region, according to Spanish forensics specialist Jose Antonio Llorente.
"This is the laboratory that is qualitatively and quantitatively the best and most equipped in all of Latin America in terms of quantity and skill of the staff and in equipment," he said during a visit to Santiago to monitor the results of the DNA method he helped introduce here.