Patio 29  Patio 29 (Spanish: Yard 29) is a common grave site in Santiago General Cemetery in Chile, where political prisoners, especially those who "disappeared" during the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, were buried anonymously. The mass grave, the largest of Augusto Pinochet's military government, was used for unannounced and unmarked burials in the 1970s until an anonymous tip alerted the public to its usage. With the return of democracy to Chile in 1990, an exhumation effort through 2006 recovered 126 bodies in 105 graves and identified three-quarters of the victims. A 2005 DNA test later reported widespread identification errors and a new identification database began in 2007. Exhumation authorities report that the site has been fully exhumed, a claim contested by which families of the victims. The burial grounds became Chile's first cemetery to be designated a protected national monument in 2006. The site serves as a symbol for the human rights movement and the 1973 coup's disappeared. As such, Patio 29 became part of the Bachelet government's "symbolic reparation" program. Annual marches against the coup end at the site. In 1973 a military coup overthrew the socialist Chilean government and replaced it with a military dictatorship headed by Augusto Pinochet, the Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army. The military rule was characterized by systematic suppression of all political dissidence. The worst violence occurred within the first three months of the coup, with the number of suspected dissidents killed or "disappeared" reaching several thousand. In 1979, the Vicariate of Solidarity, the Catholic Church's human rights office, received information regarding illegal burials of six victims from Paine, Chile in a section of Santiago's main cemetery, known as Patio 29; this led to a court investigation which revealed that Patio 29 had been used to anonymously bury the unmarked bodies of executed political prisoners between 1970 and 1980, especially those kidnapped during the 1973 coup. In 1981, Santiago's military prosecutor prohibited the unmarked bodies from being incinerated or removed, though Walkowitz and Knauer wrote in "Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space" that the military government dug up and hid hundreds of these bodies in 1982. Following the end of military rule and return of democracy to Chile in 1990, investigation of human rights violations became a top priority. Though a 1978 amnesty decree prevented prosecution for pre-1978 offenses, the new Aylwin government sought disclosure of the truth and recompense for the victim's families and appointed a National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation.