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Since the early 1990s, forensic exhumation of mass graves in the wake of violent conflict has become an increasingly important humanitarian intervention. Exhumation has two stated aims: to document evidence of atrocity for judicial proceedings and to return bodies to families to bring psychological closure. Exhumation is premised on the idea that opening graves bring mourners' closure, but little research has been done to examine how humanitarian exhumation affects the families of the missing. In this article, I consider the return of the exhumed remains to families and reflect on the relationship between mourning, violence, and transformation. I argue that humanitarian forensic exhumation is underwritten by a model of grief derived from Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholy. Drawing on fieldwork in Argentina, I claim that this model ultimately proves inadequate to capture the varieties of experience described by families of the missing. I develop "elegiac transformation" as a theoretical lens to explore experiences of exhumation. While forensic discourse emphasizes "closure," the return of bodies to families may be more generatively conceived as opening memories, old wounds, and new possibilities for healing, transforming its participants. [death forced disappearance mourning forensic exhumation and transformative experience] Résument Desde la década de 1990, la exhumación forense de fosas comunes después de conflictos violentos se ha convertido en una intervención humanitaria de creciente importancia. La exhumación tiene dos objetivos explícitos: documentar evidencia de atrocidades para los procedimientos judiciales y devolver los cuerpos a las familias para lograr un cierre psicológico. La exhumación se basa en la idea de que la apertura de las fosas produce un cierre psicológico para los dolientes, pero se han realizado pocas investigaciones para examinar cómo afecta la exhumación humanitaria a las familias de los desaparecidos. En este artículo, abordo el tema de la devolución de los restos exhumados a las familias y reflejo la relación entre el duelo, la violencia y la transformación. Sostengo que la exhumación forense humanitaria está suscrita por un modelo de duelo derivado de la distinción de Freud entre el duelo y la melancolía. Basándome en el trabajo de campo en Argentina, afirmo que este modelo finalmente resulta inadecuado para aprehender las variedades de experiencias descritas por las familias de los desaparecidos. Elaboro la "transformación elegíaca" como una lente teórica para explorar las experiencias de la exhumación. Mientras que el discurso forense hace énfasis en el "cierre", el retorno de los cuerpos a las familias puede ser conceptualizado de manera más generativa como la apertura de recuerdos, antiguas heridas y nuevas posibilidades de sanación, transformando a sus participantes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Forensic anthropologists seek to decipher traces of anonymous dead, to restitute identities of human remains and to provide their families with the possibility to conclude mourning and even of justice. The article explores the contributions and meanings of forensic anthropology as state-independent practice beyond a mereley criminalistic approach, as it was conceptualized by the Argentine pioneers after the last dictatorship in this nation. I conceive this practice as a sort of arqueol - ogy of contemporary terror that seeks to confront a specific violence as the forced disappearance of persons and the deshumanization of their dead bodies. The article proposes reading forensic anthropology as a 'situated cience', with its complexities and ambigueties, that operates between nameless bones (the human remains) and names without bodies (the so-called disappeared) in settings of violent pasts such as Argentina or Guatemala, and especially in Mexico, where mass graves became the new symbol of a horrified present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the content of the report Nunca Más (Never Again) elaborated by the "National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons" (CONADEP) created in Argentina in 1983 by the President Raúl Alfonsín to investigate the destiny of the thousands of missing persons caused by the state repression, It examines its strategy to expose the system of disappearance and its reading of the political violence. The paper conclude that Never Again articulated the premises of the restored democracy to think the political violence on the basis of the constructed narrative done to denounce these crimes by the affected of the disappearances. These elements did not illustrate the past in historical terms and they did not even assume the citizenship universal condition of people affected by the state violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La desaparición forzada de personas es un crimen de lesa humanidad, que surgió como una práctica generalizada de los estados totalitarios, con el fin de eliminar a disidentes políticos, cuyos antecedentes se remontan, a la Revolución francesa, la revolución bolchevique, y la Segunda Guerra Mundial1. Sin embargo, esta conducta penal cobró fuerza en Latinoamérica, convirtiéndose en una táctica represiva de las dictaduras militares instauradas en nuestro continente a lo largo del siglo XX y su objetivo principal, fue la eliminación de disidentes políticos. Este texto se centra en el análisis del delito de desaparición forzada en América Latina y contiene una breve descripción de su ejecución durante los gobiernos militares de Argentina y Chile, pues estos regímenes marciales implementaron con mayor frecuencia, frente a otros gobiernos de América, la práctica de las desapariciones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]