Diego R. Nunez
Mass graves contain evidence that is essential for the realisation of truth, justice and reparation. In this sense, their protection plays a fundamental part in State’s compliance with their human rights obligations. This position is further reinforced in the international legal landscape. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), for instance, has repeatedly underscored the State’s obligation to obtain information on burial sites and to adopt the measures necessary for their investigation and protection; similarly, the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) has reiterated the same obligations, putting particular emphasis on the need to systematically map these sites. Yet, the MaGPIE team has observed that despite the broad agreement on the importance of documenting these burial sites, efforts in this regard are often fragmented, even in places where mass graves are widespread.
Many Latin American countries have suffered periods of war or state violence where the criminal practice of enforced disappearance was widely employed. Most countries continue to carry the legacy of their desaparecidos and, tragically, clandestine graves have become an unavoidable concern for many citizens. The discovery, location and documentation of clandestine graves reveal patterns of ambiguous governance across Latin America, consequence of the structures of government and power relationships that persist after the return to democracy in each country. In this post, we will briefly focus on the status of mass graves investigations in Argentina, Chile and Perú, offering an overview of the findings and a map of known mass graves.
Fig. 1: Map of documented mass graves in Argentina, Chile and Perú. Data collected by MaGPIE up to December 2025.
ARGENTINA
After the coup in March 1976, the civic-military regime in Argentina began a highly coordinated plan of political repression that employed kidnapping, torturing and often murdering people identified as enemies of the regimes. When the dictatorship ended in 1983 the country adopted several different measures to deal with the legacy of past violence.
Argentina was the first country to perform exhumations as part of the process of searching victims of enforced disappearance. Since 1984, this task has been led by the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF). According to official data, the EAAF has conducted excavations in most Argentinian provinces, Uruguay and Paraguay, finding victims’ remains in at least 91 locations that include public cemeteries, clandestine detention centres and remote or protected locations. MaGPIE was able to document at least 68 mass grave sites in Argentina, more than 70% located in cemeteries:
Fig. 2: Data concerning mass graves’ physical structure in Argentina.
It is possible to distinguish between at least three main modalities of disposal:
- Burials in public cemeteries: the most common method which juxtaposed clandestine and legal forms of repression. The bodies of the victims were abandoned in public places and reported to the police. After being collected and forensically examined, they were buried as No Names (NNs). This procedure was also employed in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay.
- Death flights: Prisoners in clandestine detention centres (CDC) were sedated, carried into aircrafts and dropped in the ocean. Only a fraction of the total victims of death flights washed ashore and could be retrieved.
- Clandestine burials: In many CDCs the bodies of the victims were buried in military premises or remote locations. Perpetrators often destroyed the bodies burning them or sealing them with concrete in barrels.
Due to the methods of disposal employed it is safe to state that the total number of victims of the regime can’t be determined beyond reasonable doubt. But while death flights and clandestine burials have proven to be an excellent method to conceal evidence, the findings made so far in public cemeteries are a clear example of the importance of following ‘paper trails’. From the very beginning, the EAAF worked with documentation produced by state bureaucracies such as death certificates, autopsies, fingerprints, criminal records, court cases and intelligence files, among other records; in parallel, the collaborations and interviews with survivors and relatives of the desparecidos facilitated more comprehensive reconstructions of the events that permitted the identification of sites of interest for forensic investigations.
Despite certain setbacks in matters of transitional justice over the last years, Argentina represents a highly successful model of investigation into enforced disappearance. Sustained forensic and documentary efforts not only contributed to the recovery and identification of victims but also played a crucial role in judicial accountability and historical clarification. The evidence produced by forensic investigations was later incorporated into national and international trials, including the prosecutions of former members of the armed forces and security agencies for crimes against humanity. Moreover, the Argentine experience helped consolidate forensic anthropology as a central tool in human rights investigations worldwide, setting methodological standards that have since been replicated in other post-authoritarian and post-conflict contexts.
CHILE
According to the Ministry of Justice, the number of victims of enforced disappearances in Chile is 1469, of which only 307 have been found. The numbers, in the main, refer to people disappeared during the military regime (1973-1990). The existence of different typologies of crimes associated with the graves implies different approaches from an investigative perspective. It is harder to find information concerning indiscriminate violence, as little to no registers exist about the victims, their detention or execution beyond anecdotes; targeted and coordinated crimes though are more likely to leave paper traces behind which might constitute a primary source of material for the investigation.
Fig. 3: Data concerning mass graves’ physical structure in Chile.
Enforced disappearance wasn’t employed homogeneously over the territory, and while data collected by MaGPIE and other sources proves that there is a concentration of crimes in urban areas, particularly in Santiago, there are an important number of cases in more rural, mining or industrial areas. Multiple modalities of body disposal were employed to conceal summary executions: in the early period, victims were frequently buried as NN in public cemeteries (such as Cauquenes, Talca, Playa Ancha) or left unburied following raids or curfew violations; numerous burial sites were located in military premises (Fuerte Arteaga, Peldehue) or remote locations (Baños de Chihuío, Lonquén); as repression became more targeted, bodies were often destroyed or thrown into the sea or rivers from helicopters. There are also 18 documented cases where bodies were illegally exhumed and relocated, but none are comparable with the scale of the Operación Retiro de Televisores, a large scale campaign of removal and destruction of bodies which has seriously undermined the possibility of finding all the missing persons.
Despite the magnitude of the crime and the obligations of the State under international law, there was no clear state policy to search for victims of enforced disappearance until 2023, when the Plan Nacional de Búsqueda (National Search Plan) began its operations. While marked by strong symbolic and political actions which framed the search for missing persons as a state policy, the operational impact was minimal in the first year and mass grave investigations remained largely reactive. In 2024, the implementation of the plan exposed significant constraints: although dozens of sites were identified, judicial authorization requirements remain a limiting factor. By 2025, the Plan Nacional de Búsqueda gained political and international recognition as a transitional justice instrument but reports still highlight the absence of proactive search initiatives, excessive administrative discretion, and the lack of results in mass grave investigations.
PERÚ
The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) established that approximately 69000 people, both civilians and combatants, died in twenty years of war between the Peruvian security forces and the guerrilla groups Shining Path and Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Army (MRTA). During the armed conflict, Peruvian security forces committed grave abuses including many that constitute war crimes, such as extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, torture, sexual violence, and other serious human rights violations. The TRC documented more than 4,600 graves, of which 2,200 were allegedly subjected to preliminary investigations, but less than 30 cases were made public in the same document. With a great effort, MaGPIE was able to document 42 mass grave sites in Perú through open sources, which constitute less than 2% of the allegedly investigated mass graves. The data is fragmented, incomplete, and not easily available.
Fig. 4: Data concerning mass graves’ physical structure in Perú.
The exhumations were initiated by relatives and local communities with the support from human rights organizations, but progress has been uneven due to a variety of factors. Fear and poverty often prevent families from coming forward. The country’s diverse terrain can make the groundwork of locating and exhuming sites challenging; the lack of forensic capacity in the earlier period of exhumations has also contributed to the lack of results. According to the TRC, over 40% of these victims were Quechua-speaking peasants from the highland department of Ayacucho, where communities maintain a strong collective identity tied to ancient traditions that do not always accept exhumations as a necessary part of the reparatory process. In some cases, the traditions in place see the exhumations as a disturbance of the natural cycle of return to earth; in other cases, the poverty and lack of trust in the authorities rejects the idea of investing resources in the dead when basic human survival needs are barely met. In some districts villagers demand the identification of their loved ones to provide a dignified burial, and while certain programs have been successful to integrate the participation of the communities in these processes, the psychosocial support has been inconsistent mainly due to lack of resources, potentially resulting in the revictimization of the survivors and families. Even more problematic from a perspective of memorialization, it seems that the campaign of violence in Ayacucho has been unaccounted for by mainstream Peruvian society, revealing the existence of a persistent logic of “absolute exclusion” towards these groups.
Fig. 5: Map of documented mass graves in Perú. Data collected by MaGPIE up to December 2025.
Up to 2013, DNA testing was not available in the country. Traditional methods have not produced many positive results, while fragments of human remains have proved impossible to identify. The implication of non-identification is that the recovered human remains in the forensic exhumation could not constitute proper legal evidence within the Peruvian penal code: within the category of extrajudicial execution and aggravated murder, victims must be identified; within the category of forced disappearance, the bodies of the victims are, by definition, missing. Therefore, these human remains entered a legal limbo, where they only constitute contextual evidence for the prosecution. Up to February 2026, plenty of human remains remain unidentified due to limited forensic capacity and underdeveloped DNA databanks.
Despite periods of regression, Argentina maintained a broad consensus that enforced disappearance constituted a crime against humanity and that investigating it was a state obligation. This continuity allowed investigations to persist across changing governments and legal frameworks. The case of Chile and Perú are different though. In both countries, investigations exist, but they are fragmented, discontinuous and heavily constrained. The absence of early, independent forensic institutions such as the EAAF have limited the consistency in the investigations and the development of an adequate professional capacity. Argentina’s success also relied heavily on dense state bureaucratic records that unintentionally documented crimes. In contrast, the Chilean dictatorship was careful in destroying and withholding records, leaving fewer administrative traces in cemeteries and civil registries. In Perú, on the other hand, the violence occurred largely in rural and conflict zones where deaths were rarely formally registered at all, especially among Indigenous populations. Cemetery records, death certificates and autopsy files often simply do not exist. This structural absence of documentation severely limited the ability to locate graves through archival cross-checking.
Finally, Argentina’s success also depends on a sustained strong collaboration with victims’ relatives and the civil society. This sustained dialogue helped guide forensic searches, contextualize findings, and legitimize investigations both socially and politically. In contrast, the engagement with civil society in Chile and Perú has been less systematic. In Chile the climate of fear and the legal protection initially granted to perpetrators reduced the participation of victims and survivors during the early critical years. In Perú, the mistrust toward state institutions from Indigenous communities combined with geographic isolation, linguistic barriers and lack of funds have severely undermined the instances of cooperation. Without strong, institutional mechanisms to integrate family, survivor and local knowledge, many burial sites remain unidentified or only partially investigated.
