My God, my God… my Christ, our Christ, while I was praying in silence watching those bones, I thought of you! … How much I wanted and would have liked for you to arrive and order, as you did to Lazarus: rise Simón, this is not the time to die!1
—Hugo Chávez
We can perhaps trace this recent rediscovery of the dead to the development of new technologies within the context of forensic anthropology that allow us to look deeper into bones, particularly advances in molecular biology, DNA analysis, and toxicological procedures.4 However, this raises questions about the status of the dead in contemporary societies. We are used to thinking of death as the end of living, the final confirmation of a life whose biography is summed up in the obituary. But the recent proliferation of politically motivated exhumations seems to indicate otherwise, suggesting that death is hardly an end. What then do we make of this growing trend, of this desire to make the dead speak once more, to make them once again participants in the public sphere? And how should we frame the role of forensic sciences within these processes?