A Chilean human rights judge has carried out the final procedure needed to confirm the identity of Bernarda Rosalba Vera Contardo, a woman found in Argentina in 2025 who was on the list of 1,162 people detained and disappeared during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990). On Monday Judge Álvaro Mesa released the results of a DNA test establishing that ‘the probability’ that Vera has been identified ‘is greater than 99.9999%.’

Her relatives had lost all contact with her in 1973. Vera has a daughter who grew up believing her mother to be one of the “disappeared” victims of the Pinochet regime. The tests were carried out with samples available in the Genetic Bank of Relatives of the Detained and Executed Political Prisoners of the Legal Medical Service (SML).

Vera’s case was uncovered in 2024 as part of the National Search for Truth and Justice Plan promoted by the government of former Chilean president Gabriel Boric (2022-2026). One of the plan’s investigators, journalist Pascale Bonnefoy, who in early 2024 was researching victims from Neltume in southern Chile who had been members of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), asked locals about Bernarda Rosalba Vera Contardo. She found inconsistencies in the accounts: extrajudicial testimonies indicated that the woman, who had been sentenced to death, may have managed to flee Chile at the end of 1973—without her family knowing—and could be living in Argentina.

Vera, who used the political name Anita, also shows up in the report of the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation (Rettig), promoted by former president Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994). She is listed as a teacher who was 27 in 1973 and had a five-year-old daughter, and who was detained by soldiers on October 10, 1973, and ‘is presumed to have been executed on the Villarrica bridge over the Toltén River’ along with 15 other detainees from Liquiñe.

Vera’s family lost trace of her the weekend before the September 11, 1973, coup against the government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973). That was the last time her parents and daughter saw her alive.

In the early hours of September 12, 1973, a group of MIR members staged an attack, which was foiled, on the Carabineros post in Neltume in the pre-Andean foothills; they intended to seize weapons to defend the deposed government. Bernarda Vera is believed to have been part of that group, and the military searched for her through the streets by name. Some former comrades also say she was in Neltume.

Bonnefoy’s investigation formed the basis of the confidential inquiry opened by Judge Álvaro Meza, who in October 2025 opened a sealed case file. Part of those procedures was to carry out the DNA test.

Alongside Vera’s case, the Search Plan also secured official recognition as a victim of the dictatorship for Luis Pinto Soto, a 15-year-old who disappeared in July 1986 on the eve of a large national protest against the dictatorship.

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