Bones as Witness After we had been working for several months,
the junta—the nine individuals who served as the military
dictators of Argentina during this period—were brought to trial,
and we were asked to present the forensic evidence at the trial.
We were only allotted a couple of hours of testimony. We told
the story of the young woman that we had found, and we were able
to get her identified as Liliana Pereyra; 21-year-old bank clerk
who was seven months pregnant at the time of her disappearance
in the city of Mar de la Plata in 1977. When we exhumed the
skeleton, we found that the skull was shattered into between 15
and 20 fragments and when we got it together, we could see that
the fracture patterns that we observed are very typical of what
we see with close-range shotgun blasts to the head. And in the
grave scattered amongst these bones, we also found several badly
corroded shotgun pellets. This is typical of someone who's been
executed with a shotgun. And that was a common means of killing
the desapa