Patio 29

Patio 29 is a potter's field burial ground within the Cementerio General (General Cemetery) located in Santiago, Chile. It was used for burying victims of the 1973 coup d'état and the military government that subsequently took power under dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Many of these victims buried at Patio 29 were mutilated, tortured, and executed by the military regime. It began to be used for unannounced burials in the 1970s, until information of its use was anonymously leaked to the public. When a democratically-elected government returned to Chile in 1991, the government began a 15-year effort (1991–2006) to exhume and identify the remains. In 2005, it was discovered that DNA tests reported significant identification errors and a new identification database was created in 2007. Exhumation authorities report that the site has been fully exhumed, although families of the victims contest. While many of the remains have been identified, others remain unknown. Several victims thought to have been interred at Patio 29 are unaccounted for.

In 2006, Patio 29 became protected by the Chilean government as a national monument—the first cemetery to be so designated. The site serves as a memorial to the human rights movement and to honour the 1973 coup's disappeared victims.

The Pinochet regime and human rights violations
Patio 29 is a potter's field in the Santiago General Cemetery where the victims of mutilation, torture, and execution under the Pinochet military government were buried. The cemetery section is bordered by Mexico Avenue to the north, O'Higgins Avenue to the east, Copihues Street to the south, and Maitenes Street to the west. Though the cemetery changed its section numbering in 1987, the section is still known as Patio 29. The graves remain marked by their original rusted iron cross headstones with a date and "NN" for "no name". Most dates fall within the last four months of 1973. The site has not been reused for burials. Folksinger Víctor Jara, a prominent casualty of the 1973 coup, lies in a crypt across from Patio 29.

The plot was used to anonymously bury the unmarked bodies of executed political prisoners between 1970 and 1980. The Vicariate of Solidarity received a tipoff on illegal burials at Patio 29 in 1979: six victims from Paine, Chile, into which a judge investigated. In 1981, Santiago's military prosecutor prohibited the unmarked bodies from being incinerated or removed. With the return of democracy in 1991 and at the prosecutor's behest, research projects began exhuming and identifying the bodies in 1991. Still, Walkowitz and Knauer in Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space wrote that the military government dug up and hid hundreds of these bodies in 1982. In Reckoning with Pinochet, Stern suggests that new bodies discovered at Patio 29 in 1991 contributed to the reframing of the responsible soldiers on trial as criminals. , 126 bodies were found, of which 96 were identified by the Medical Legal Institute in 1998. More than 1,000 of the disappeared from this period have not been found. The examiners found multiple bodies stacked within coffins and some filled with bullets. Augusto Pinochet explained that bodies were stacked to save space ("What great economizing!"), and later apologized after a public uproar. This comment embarrassed Pinochet's followers and "reactivated cultural revulsion and human rights sensibilities".

Authorities reported that all bodies had been exhumed by 2006, though some families of the victims disagreed. Skepticism about the matches' veracity emerged in 2003, and the institute's own DNA testing in 2005 revealed a project rife with mistakes and exaggerated certainty: 48 bodies were wrongly identified and 37 more were doubted. The Medical Legal Institute created a new DNA database in May 2007. Three bodies were positively identified in late 2009.

As a memorial
The es (in English: "Memorial of the Disappeared and Executed for Political Reasons") at the cemetery's metro entrance and ten-minute walk to Patio 29 and Víctor Jara's tomb together form a "popular route" through the cemetery for tourists, as opposed to the "patrimonial route" past the graves of Chilean political leaders. A sign at the Patio 29 memorial describes the site as "an emblematic place of the human rights violations that took place between 1973 and 1990 as it was used to cover up the bodies and identities of the detained disappeared and politically executed during the military regime". The anniversary protests against the 11 September 1973 coup start at the then-besieged La Moneda presidential palace and conclude here at the General Cemetery.

Chile's National Monuments Council declared Patio 29 a National Monument on 13 July 2006 at the request of a group of Chamber of Deputies legislators. The Council chose the site for its proof of the Pinochet military government's elaborate procedures used to conceal the disappeared's bodies and their identities. At the ceremony, Patio 29 was described as a symbol of the country's painful history and an educational place for human rights education. As a national monument, the site will be conserved and maintained by government funds unless ordered by the courts otherwise. It is the first cemetery to become a national monument in Chile.

In 2008, the National Monuments Council ran an architectural contest to revitalize Patio 29, and chose a project that would create a music plaza with seven copper columns linking Víctor Jara's tomb with Patio 29. The memorial is made of 3,032 precast concrete bricks.

The exhumations at Patio 29 led to two documentaries: Patio 29: Histories of Silence, and Fernando ha vuelto, which told the story of recovering Fernando Olivares Mori's body from the plot, his burial, and an interview with his wife after the DNA-based doubts were posited. In a review of Patio 29 Tras la Cruz de Fierro, Katrien Klep placed the book alongside an international human rights trend towards "memorialization", Southern Cone writings about "monuments, memorials, and lugares de memoria [places of memory]", and interest in reconciling their divided societies. As such, Patio 29 became part of the Bachelet government's "symbolic reparation" program.