Some traditional centers of exhumation fever, like Mexico, have actually calmed down somewhat. Back in the 1920s, Mexican leaders were exhuming major figures from the War of Independence, placing them in a monument. Gone, too, is Mexico’s frenzy in the 1940s over disputed remains of the Aztec ruler Cuauhtémoc and the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.

Now other countries, with Chile at the forefront, seem to be picking up the slack. Salvador Allende, the Chilean president toppled in the 1973 coup, was exhumed in 2011 so that investigators could determine whether he had committed suicide or been killed by his adversaries as they stormed the presidential palace. They concluded that he killed himself with an AK-47 assault rifle, confirming the official story.

A previous exhumation in 2004 in Chile of Eduardo Frei Montalva, president from 1964 to 1970, produced remarkable findings that encouraged new exhumations in Chile and beyond. While doctors had originally said that Mr. Frei Montalva died in 1982 from complications after surgery to treat a stomach ailment, investigators concluded that he had been poisoned with small doses of mustard gas and thallium, a highly toxic heavy metal.

Latin America is far from the only region where political or intellectual figures are unearthed, as shown by the 2012 exhumation of Yasir Arafat, the longtime Palestinian leader, to examine poisoning claims, and Spain’s attempts to find and identify the remains of the poet Federico García Lorca and others killed during the Spanish Civil War.

But whether to solve the mysteries of death or promote tales of heroism, Latin America is a region where digging up the dead and sometimes even mutilating their remains have long been a fixture of politics. Scholars say the practice may be the secularized continuation of customs from the time of early Christianity, when a vibrant trade involved the body parts of saints.

Brazil, Latin America’s largest country, has its own precedents, including the transport of remains across the Atlantic Ocean to reinforce the narrative of Brazil’s emergence as an independent nation. In the 1930s, the authoritarian regime of Getúlio Vargas collected the remains of the Inconfidentes, participants in an 18th-century separatist movement, from burial places in Africa, where they had died in exile, and reburied them in Minas Gerais State.