The remains of Amelia Sanjurjo were identified yesterday in the Battalion 14 for him Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), a task that had its technical complications but that gives hope to the Uruguay to continue finding answers to the silence left by the civil-military dictatorship.
The person in charge of the team of anthropologists who investigate the properties, Alicia Lusiardo, He assured that Amelia’s case required a different complexity than the other identifications. “It has required multidisciplinary, it has required technique, which allows us to face a comparison that did not have the best materials at the beginning and that had to be built over the course of this entire year,” the anthropologist told Subrayado.
Lusiardo refers to the fact that Amelia’s sister, who had left her blood sample, had already died and the genetic coincidence was not statistically significant. From there, they had to look for living relatives of the victim and even resort to exhuming a body, in order to be 99.9% certain that it was her.
On the other hand, the anthropologist highlighted that Amelia’s body was particularly shallow and that the position also attracted attention. “They were the remains of a woman and that I was naked and face down“Lusiardo commented and assured that he had signs of violence.
Regarding the possibility that Amelia is pregnant, the anthropologist commented that no evidence of this was found in the body, so it could be a recent pregnancy. “There is no ossification of the elements that make up the skeleton,” she explained.
Lime does not cover crime
The use of lime to bury people during the dictatorship was a common practice with the aim of making it even more difficult to identify the victims. However, this technique was useful to anthropologists because the components of the material served to preserve the genetic matter.
“The discovery of lime along with the remains, which has been a constant in the Uruguayan government, It ends up being beneficial because it preserves the genetic material that the bones have. When extracting a profile, better results can be achieved,” he commented.
What’s next
The discovery of Amelia’s remains was a boost for the team of anthropologists. “The discovery is the confirmation that the bodies are there and that the difficult thing is to find them due to the lack of information. What was new was the difficulty in identifying, which could now be corrected after a year. But identification and discovery are driving forces to continue working,” she assured.
On the other hand, he announced what the next steps of the Investigation Group. “Work continues in the 14th battalion with two backhoes and two teams of anthropologists. The tasks on the Pando farm were completed in the month of March and that third team is preparing to enter a property, which has not yet been defined, but that are not military but private,” he said.
Source: Ambito
