The family of Roberto Adolfo Aparicio Oliva receives on Monday what it spent almost 37 years looking for. Panama's Ministerio Público (public prosecution service) is handing over the remains of the young man, who disappeared at 21 during the United States invasion of December 1989, at a restitution and burial ceremony set for 11am at the Jardín de Paz cemetery in Panama City.
Aparicio belonged to Batallón 2000, based in Chepo, but at the time of the attack he was posted to the Cuartel Central de las Fuerzas de Defensa (central barracks of the Panamanian Defense Forces), in the El Chorrillo district — the most heavily bombed part of the capital and the neighbourhood that lost the most homes.
Almost seven years in the laboratory for a name
His remains were recovered in January 2020, during the first exhumations at Jardín de Paz, as part of a prosecution investigation supported by the Instituto de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses (Imelcf, the forensic medicine institute).
The body was badly carbonised, which made usable genetic material hard to obtain. The Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation) managed to extract the DNA and build a genetic profile, and Imelcf compared it with reference samples given by relatives. The Comisión 20 de Diciembre de 1989, the state commission on the invasion, announced the positive identification on 24 October.
The handover follows the prosecution service's victim-care protocol, set out by the Fiscalía Metropolitana in Official Letter No. 771. For decades the family went from hospitals to cemeteries and took part in exhumations without an answer.
Fourteen names since 2023
With this case, 14 identified victims have been returned to their families since 2023, according to the Comisión 20 de Diciembre de 1989 — the state body created to establish how many people were killed or disappeared in the invasion, who they were and what happened to them, and to recommend reparations.
The figure measures both the progress and the size of what is left: every identification depends on exhuming graves, recovering genetic material from fire-damaged remains, and finding surviving relatives willing to give samples.
What happened in 1989
The US military operation, codenamed Just Cause, began on 20 December 1989, under President George H. W. Bush. Some 24,000 troops struck 27 strategic targets, mostly in Panama City and Colón. Its declared aim was to capture General Manuel Antonio Noriega and dismantle the Panamanian Defense Forces.
The bombing destroyed homes, particularly in El Chorrillo, and killed civilians and soldiers in numbers that have still never been officially established — precisely the task the commission is trying to close, one name at a time.
With information from La Estrella de Panamá, Prensa Latina and EFE.
