International lab will help identify skeletons of missing political activists

Head of the Human Rights Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic, Minister Pepe Vargas announced today (Aug. 19) that the ministry is going through the hiring process of an international lab to work on the genetic analysis of skeletons found at Cemitério de Perus, a graveyard in São Paulo. Some skeletons are supposed to be of political activists gone missing during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985). The contract value is about $570,000.

With the help of the international lab to the ongoing work in the lab of the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp in the Portuguese acronym), the identification is expected to be completed by the end of 2016.

"The right to have a memory is fundamental and must be guaranteed by the state and by society itself. The search for truth is an essential task of a democratic state. This is crucial for society to understand how repression settled, and also to prevent it from happening again," said the minister during a visit to the site where the skeletons are stored.

On Saturday (Aug. 15), the Federal Prosecution Office (MPF) received over 614 skeletons found in the facilities of Cemitério de Perus, which was used during the military dictatorship to secretly bury murdered political activists and other victims of violence in the regime.

Human remains will be stored in a room safe in the underground of MPF in São Paulo, until they are transferred to the lab at Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), which is being expanded to receive a new shipment. The lab has already 433 boxes of skeletons also found in Cemitério de Perus.

The content of 385 boxes has been checked. 85 percent were identified as skeletons of male adults and 5 percent of children. In 22 percent of the boxes, there were remains from more than one person, which means that the number of people to be identified may be bigger than expected. Through anthropological analysis, archaeologists estimate the biological profile of skeletons, including sex, height, age and possible traumas. Physicians, dentists and geneticists from Unifesp take part in the archaeologist identification work.

Translated by Amarílis Anchieta

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