Grave Mistakes: The History and Future of Chile’s ‘Disappeared’

This Undark piece—written by Fletcher Reveley and photographed by Kitra Cahana, with reporting by Macarena Minguell—examines Chile’s decades-long efforts to locate and identify victims forcibly disappeared during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Major missteps over the years from the Servicio Médico Legal, the state’s forensic unit, have led to the mishandling and misidentification of many bodies, deepening the victims’ families’ pain and distrust of the government. Alongside excellent reporting, Reveley tells the emotional story of Flor Lazo, a woman from the agricultural city of Paine, whose father, two brothers, and two uncles were among those who vanished—and who, 50 years on, continues to grapple with the injustice of these mass killings.

Isabel Reveco no longer denies the misidentifications, although she finds the final tally — 59 bodies — difficult to accept. Sitting at a cafe in Santiago last March, she admitted to cultivating a degree of willful ignorance as a defense against her feelings of guilt. “I don’t want to know,” she said. “I have no idea of the number. If you tell me now, I’ll forget by the afternoon. Because it hurts me a lot.” But as she began to speak about the errors, those defense mechanisms quickly fell away. “I think there must be many explanations,” she said. “Perhaps we weren’t experts. We didn’t have the experience, surely. We didn’t consider many factors. We had erroneous information. We had antiquated methods that were very old, and we didn’t have DNA. I believe it must be several things, not one. What I can tell you is that we had the best intentions.” Despite her intentions, however, the fallout from the mistakes has sparked in Reveco a somber reappraisal of her life’s work. “If I could go back in time I would not have become a forensic anthropologist,” she said. “I realized that what I did was useless. I caused pain, and I was so wrong that my work has no validity.”