Dozens of Chile dictatorship victims were misidentified

SANTIAGO, Chile, Apr 25 (Reuters) - The bodies of dozens of leftists killed early in Chile's 1973-1990 dictatorship may have been given to the wrong families for burial, a mix-up that has embarrassed the ruling center-left coalition.

President Michelle Bachelet, herself a former political prisoner, named a special delegate to help families get correct identifications of the bodies, and Congress has asked for an investigation into possible criminal negligence.

Of more than 100 bodies dumped in a mass grave in Santiago's general cemetery soon after Augusto Pinochet's September 11, 1973, military coup, the state Forensic Institute recently said new DNA tests showed it incorrectly identified 48.

The institute's report was discomfiting for Bachelet, who has close ties to human rights groups. Although she took office only on March 11, she now faces complaints that her coalition, in power since 1990, knew about the poor forensic work for years.

''It's important not to prejudge whether information has been hidden or not,'' presidential spokesman Ricardo Lagos Weber told reporters today.

''President Bachelet has taken this very much to heart and is following it very closely. We are guaranteeing that the best efforts will be taken with the available resources to correctly identify the victims,'' Weber said.

The existence of the corpses is unusual. An estimated 3,000 people died in political violence during Chile's 17-year dictatorship, but many bodies were dumped into the ocean and never recovered.

The bodies in this case were dug up in 1991 after the country returned to democracy, and forensic experts used facial reconstruction, fingerprints and dental records to identify them as people arrested by the military in the national palace during the coup and farmers taken on the outskirts of the capital.

REUTERS OM RAI0154