56

Using a sociological and ethnographic approach, this article examines the process of memorialization based on the experience of forced disappearances during the Pinochet dictatorship. The analysis focuses on the case of Patio 29, in the General Cemetery of Santiago, which was used by the Chilean military regime to hide bodies and to erase the identity of its victims. It addresses, from a diachronic perspective, how the management of the disappeared, and then that of their recovered corpses, has permanently affected Chilean society up to the present day, both politically and symbolically. This article focuses first on the motives and modalities of the clandestine burial of bodies carried out by the military, in order to examine its impact on the population, and particularly on the friends and relatives of the victims, who hope to see them alive again as long as the bodies have not reappeared. It also shows how, once the death of their relatives has been accepted, families will mobilize to claim the truth about their posthumous destiny in order to locate their remains. Finally, the article highlights the important controversies relating to the process of exhumation and identification of the disappeared of Patio 29 in the democratic context of the 1990s and focuses on a critical reading of the phenomenon of patrimonialization of Patio 29 in Chile.