Deceased Don't All Weight The Same. A reflection on the political identification of bones from the Perus mass grave

In 2014, the Perus Working Group, a multidisciplinary team of forensic experts, was created in Brazil to identify the human remains exhumed in 1990 from the Perus Grave. By this name came to be known a clandestine mass grave in the Dom Bosco Municipal Cemetery, in Perus district, Sao Paulo. The Perus Grave was discovered in the late 1970s and still is the most important mass grave reported as the final destination of activists victims of forced disappearance during the Dictatorship (1964-1985). It is also the only one to have received institutional and scientific attention. Drawing from ethnographic research, this paper analyzes the GTP identification process, decomposing its stages, procedures, practices, and documents. I argue that the overall purpose of the process is to scrutinize the ensemble in order to select the remains that will be taken as political ones. I discuss three aspects of the process: the scientific treatment of the remains as humanization; the identification as a classification process; and the relation between the scientific fact production and the State Building and Nation Building process.