Forensic identification of skeletal remains from members of Ernesto Che Guevara's guerrillas in Bolivia based an DNA typing

We report the positive identification of several members of the guerrillas led by Ernesto "Che" Guevara on the 1960 s in Bolivia by means of DNA finge rprinting. Successful DNA typing of both short tandem repeat loci and the h ypervariable region of the human mitochondrial DNA was achieved after extra cting total DNA from bones obtained from two burial sites. Given the size o f the Cuban database for the STR allele frequencies, a conservative approac h was followed to estimate the statistical significance of the genetic evid ence. The estimated probabilities of paternity for the two cases in which t he paternity logic was applied were higher than 99%. One case was analyzed using mitochondrial DNA and could not be excluded from the identity propose d by the forensic anthropology team. A fourth case was identified by exclus ion, on the basis of the positive identification of the other remains, the historical and other anthropological evidence.