‘It became an obsession’: the long search for the remains of Pinochet’s victims

‘Every time somebody had a lead … we’d head out into the desert once more.’ Violeta Berríos at her home in the city of Calama, Chile. Photograph: Cristian Rudolffi/The Guardian

For nearly two decades, Violeta Berríos and Victoria Saavedra scoured Chile’s Atacama desert looking for any trace of their missing loved ones. Each evening as dusk fell across the barren plain, they would pile a few small rocks to mark the extent of their search, then turn back into the gloom empty-handed, agreeing to resume the next day.

In the weeks after Gen Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état deposed the democratically elected president Salvador Allende in September 1973, a Puma helicopter landed in Calama, a dusty mining town in the Atacama. Its passengers were members of a death squad that came to be known as the “Caravan of Death”.