Nearly 50 years after her death, Uruguay lays to rest a woman disappeared by its dictatorship

[Judi Lynn]

Relatives of prisoners disappeared carry the coffin that contains the remains of Amelia Sanjurjo during her funeral service at the University of the Republic, in Montevideo, Uruguay, Thursday, June 6, 2024. The Uruguayan Prosecutor’s Office confirmed that the human remains found in June 2023 at the 14th Battalion of the Uruguayan Army belong to Sanjurjo, a victim of the 1973-1985 dictatorship who was 41 years old and pregnant at the time of her disappearance. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico)


BY MATILDE CAMPODONICO
Updated 7:06 PM CDT, June 6, 2024

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) — Nearly five decades after Uruguayan security forces seized Amelia Sanjurjo from the street, disappearing the newly pregnant woman into the maw of the military’s prison system, she received a proper burial on Thursday in her hometown of Montevideo.

The bone fragments of Sanjurjo — described as a kind, patient and disheveled-looking employee at a publishing house and member of Uruguay’s Communist party — were exhumed exactly a year ago from a military base in a small southern town in Uruguay. She was finally identified last week after investigators took DNA samples from her maternal aunt and nephews in Uruguay, Spain and Italy in hopes of finding a match.

The revelation was as thrilling as it was grim. Forensic teams have only recovered the remains of five other disappeared people in Uruguay since excavations began in 2005. The vast majority of the nearly 200 people kidnapped and killed during the country’s dictatorship remain unidentified.

The search for bone fragments, teeth and shreds of clothing, investigators say, is the hardest part, given that members of the dictatorship deliberately destroyed DNA in an effort to deny that detainees were tortured and killed.

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