Capacidades o funcionamientos

The first time that forensic technologies were used for documenting human rights abuses was in Argentina in 1985, when a group of international forensic scientists arrived in the country to provide expert technical assistance in the identification of thousands of victims of “state sponsored or tolerated human rights violations ” (Dieterich, 1986, p. 40; Snow et al., 1992; Rosenblatt, 2015; Smith, 2016).

During the Cold War period, the U.S. pursued an active, interventionist foreign policy in Latin America under “Operation Condor”, spreading propaganda to attempt to thwart communist uprisings in various regions, as well as supporting (even implant i ng) authoritarian governments. As Dieterich argues (1986, p. 51), at the end of the 1960s the efforts to control growing urban protest movements and urban guerrilla groups generated an increase in the number of disappearances, tortures and political killings under the military dictatorships in Brazil and Uruguay, and reached a tragic climax in Argentina’s

‘Dirty War’ between 1976 and 1983. During this time, people were abducted from their homes, spaces previously deemed private and safe, and were held captive in clandestine detention centres where a “new subjectivity would be hammered out” (Taylor, 1997, p.

151). Even though human rights violations and disappearances occurred througho ut South America during Operation Condor, this chapter focuses on the Argentinian case, as the investigations carried out in response to these human rights violations also provide a reference point for the development of forensic expertise — specifically for forensic anthropology in the region. According to Rosenblatt (2015), Argentina can be deemed the birthplace of international forensic investigations, due to the networks of expertise that were established and consolidated between the U.S. and the southern cone states during this period.

53 Shortly after a democratic government was established in Argentina, Raul Alfonsin, the recently elected president “pledged to investigate and punish those responsible [for the disappearances, and human rights violations], and ordered the prosecution of the junta leaders” (Snow, et al., 1991, p. 384). In 1984, civilians —including judges, the relatives of disappeared people, forensic pathologists, police and media personnel, among others

— gathered around graves in local cemeteries marked “NN” (“No Name”). These mass graves contained some of the bodies of those who disappeared under the eight years of military rule. As Doretti and Burell describe:

[T]he press photographed bulldozers digging up several individua l graves at once, skulls and other bones flying from their shovels.

Untrained cemetery personnel tried their best to recover skeletal remains but left behind small bones, including teeth, and other evidence such as bullets. The bones were broken, lost or mixed up. Skulls were piled in one place and postcranial bones in another, destroying the relationship between the skull and the rest of the skeleton. Television screens showed doctors holding skulls with gunshot wounds (2007, p.

60).

In the light of these events, nongovernmental organisations, most notably the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and the recently formed National Commission on Disappeared Persons (CONADEP), requested forensic technical assistance from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in conducting the analysis of these mass graves. In 1984, Clyde Snow, forensic anthropologist, and Eric Stover, human rights researcher, arrived in Argentina. Having witnessed the exhumat io ns conducted by local authorities, Clyde Snow called for a “halt to all unscientific exhumations and asked local archaeologists and anthropologists to get involved in the process of exhuming the dead” (Doretti and Burell, 2007, p. 60, my emphasis).

At this time, most of the forensic experts, pathologists, and morgue technicians in the country were thought to be part of, or at least complicit in, the crimes committed during

54 the dictatorship. If forensic science practitioners are to be trusted by civilians, they need to be distanced from local “legal- medical systems and other governmental institut io ns that had reportedly committed crimes or had lost credibility during lengthy periods of human rights violations” (Doretti and Burell, 2007, p. 60). Therefore, scientists from the AAAS trained anthropology and biology students who were interested in helping with the identification of victims. It has been argued that since Clyde Snow and his students began exhuming the graves of disappeared persons in Argentina, there has been a theoretical departure from the medico-legal understanding of forensics (Rosenblatt, 2015, p. 6). This was the first time that forensic science was used “outside” its common practice in crimina l cases and ventured into investigating human rights violations committed by state authorities.

International forensic experts continued to visit Argentina over a couple of years. Snow visited the country many times over five years to train the group of young anthropology students. In 1985 this group became formally known as the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense: EAAF). The team was comprised of recent graduates from forensic archaeology and anthropology who had all responded to Snow’s request for trainees, and received practical training while carrying out the exhumations of more than 9,000 victims of the military dictatorship (CONADEP, 1984). The creation of the EAAF was followed by the foundation of other independent forensic teams in the region. The EAAF helped to train forensic teams in Chile in 1989, in Guatemala in 1992, and in Peru in 1999, and, most recently, in Colombia in 2004 (Doretti and Burell, 2007). The development of forensic expertise in response to human rights violations in the area consolidated Latin America as the pioneer in forensic humanitarian work (Rosenblatt, 2015).

Since its formation, the EAAF has branded itself as an “independent” forensic anthropology team. The EAAF’s independence was guaranteed from its formation; the

55 EAAF were trained by an international expert, and at that time, none of its team members had links to either governmental institutions or the military junta. This allowed the EAAF to be seen as trustworthy, not only by family members who were actively looking for their loved ones, but by the public in general. However, since this initial forensic work the group has been supported by new democratic institutions. Raul Alfonsin’s democratic government openly condemned the military junta leaders and set out to investigate the crimes committed and to punish their perpetrators. The consolidation of the EAAF as the first forensic team to investigate human rights abuses in the country was, then, underwritten by the support of President Raul Alfonsin’s new democratic institutio ns.

After all, these institutions were interested in documenting the crimes committed under the dictatorship. As Mercedes Doretti, founding member of the EAAF, explains:

The work [forensic investigations] is conducted under a judicial system or special body with a mandate that basically establishes what will be done and the questions or points of expertise that must be addressed.

We do not dictate the rules of engagement, or what cases are to be investigated. These decisions are often the result of a balance of forces during transitional moments (Doretti, 2009, unpaginated).

As an example of this, soon after Snow and his team started collecting evidence, a series of immunity laws for human rights violators closed off the possibility of this work to be used in legal proceedings (Rosenblatt, 2015). In response, while the identification of human remains and the exhumation of mass graves was taking place, the nongovernmental organisation, The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, contested the politica l framework of the exhumations. The Mothers wanted to shift the focus away from identifying human remains and securing economic reparations for victims, and towards holding the perpetrators accountable for these crimes (Moon, 2013). As one of them explained:

56 I am asking for [my daughter] alive, because if she isn’t, I want

to know who killed her and I want that assassin to be put in jail.

If I ask for her corpse, then I am killing her[…] (Guzman-Bouvard, 1994, p. 139 in Moon, 2013, p. 17).

In 1984, the mothers launched the “Bring them back alive” campaign as a way of contesting what they considered to be the state’s attempts to erase the disappearances of their sons and daughters. The group insisted that no forensic examination should be carried out on any remains unless was preceded by an “exhaustive enquiry to determine who gave the orders to torture and disappear” (Moon, 2013, p. 17). Due to the limitatio ns imposed by the governments’ decision to impede the possibility of legal procedures, Snow and his team began to direct their efforts beyond courtroom settings, in aid of the surviving relatives of the victims. Thus, the forensic team “began to talk about [the importance of] grief, history, and ritual” as part of their practice. (Rosenblatt, 2015, p. 6).

As Claire Moon (2013) argues, bones have politics; forensic knowledge makes powerful and unpredictable claims in social and political life. The families of the disappeared in Argentina wanted their offspring to be returned to them, but they would not accept forensic identifications reports that did not recognise those who had been killed and disappeared as political subjects who had actively opposed the military junta’s violent regime. Similar efforts for the forensic identification process to be recognised as both a scientific and a social process are drawn out by Sara Wagner’s (2008) analysis of the identification process of victims from Srebrenica’s genocide in 1995.

According to Rosenblatt (2015, p. 6) from the first human rights forensic exhumations in Argentina, forensic investigations have been crafted from a complicated relation between:

evolving scientific techniques (most notably the advent of forensic genetics); a growing international consensus on the moral obligation to investigate human right violations; the consolidation of the requisite legal bodies to prosecute these violations, along with the

57 particular political and legal challenges of any given post-conflict context. Even though forensic practitioners, as Rosenblatt suggests, are aware of the multiplicity of actors and interests involved in the practice of forensic investigations, practitioners reflective accounts on the power relations and politics embedded in their practice seem non-existe nt.

Forensic experts involved in these cases have long maintained that their scientific role in attempting to unravel the truth of past crimes has not been tainted by politics. As Snow et al. explain:

Tradition has vested the profession with a solemn authority to speak for such victims. Implicit in that is a responsibility to speak impartially and truthfully. The dead cannot perjure themselves; only human failure to listen and interpret the evidence can dishonour their final testament (Snow, et al. 1991, p. 390 see also Stover & Ryan, 2001, p. 7).

Adam Rosenblatt’s interview with Snow in 1993 shows a similarly Mertonian understanding of science. While reflecting on his career, in which he served as a catalyst and long-time leader in forensic science’s role in documenting human rights violat io ns throughout the world, Snow declared: “I’m not a human right’s activist. I’m a scientist.

I’m an expert. If I have a philosophy, it is that I’m anti-homicide” (Rosenblatt, 2015, p.

18, my emphasis). This view of science as the pursuit of the truth has left several scientific experts to draw distinctions between “scientific” and “unscientific” work, or between

“science” and “politics”. But, as STS approaches to science and knowledge have long shown, politics is not restricted to elections, presidential candidates and the law, with which most scientists have little or no involvement. But, if we understand politics as the

“spokesman of the forces you mould society with and of which you are the only credible and legitimate authority, then scientists are fully political persons” (Latour, 1983, p. 158, my emphasis). STS approaches to forensic identification have shown that victim identification operations are, in fact, deeply political endeavours as they spark, among

58 others, ethical, emotional and religious controversies (Toom, 2015, p. 3; Wagner, 2008).

In the case of Snow’s work at the EAAF, the processes of identifying victims was fully political from its outset. Moreover, in assuming that, as scientists, their role was to speak impartially and truthfully on behalf of the dead, the EAAF’s practice was, already, fully political. In short, science and technology have always been political endeavours, though some scientists, as Snow’s interview illustrates, are keen to dismiss it.

Lindsay Smith’s (2016) analysis of the Argentinian case concludes that human rights forensics, “a movement that began as an indictment of the state for the forced disappearance of its citizens, its obfuscation of their lives, their deaths and even their burials,” has “increasingly become allied with state and military officials in order to fund its identification work” (2016, p. 15). Smith argues that this shift can be seen through the ways in which family-centred approaches to the identification of victims have changed . Previously, there was a long-term engagement of experts with the affected communit ies, which provided the necessary information for the identification of victims. More recently, however, these approaches have been displaced by a strong reliance on DNA identification techniques, such as those used in the former Yugoslavia, in which the data given by family members via an ante-mortem questionnaire and anthropological analysis of human remains was, although important, subordinated to the certainty provided by forensic DNA analysis and profile matching databases.

However, as I contend in this thesis, human rights forensics is not “disappearing”. Nor are “new” technologies, such as DNA analysis or big DNA Databases, “depoliticizing”.

Rather, these approaches are problematic in that they strongly reproduce the traditio na l forensics framework where “subject” and “object”, “scientific” and “unscientif ic ”,

“politics” and “science” are divided; this is a premature process of closure and purification (Latour, 2005). My analysis of STS approaches to science-as-practice and the understanding of “islands of stability” are useful when considering the scientific

59 process as a dance of agency that avoids foreclosure and the mastery of the “object”. This model opens up possibilities for the scientific process to be revisable in practice and open-ended into the future. Thus, in this thesis I propose to study forensic investigations as situated processes of knowledge-production that allow for one object to be multiple, while not reducing alterity to an exclusive methodological and epistemological concern.

Following from Pickering (2016), the challenge is to take different ontologies seriously.

Thus far, I have engaged with how forensis is understood as a hybrid discipline operating between law and science, and I have examined whether the construction of the technica l contents of scientific investigations should be studied as situated processes of knowledge -production and not exclusively as methodological and epistemological concerns. In the next section, I will explore the political forums of forensis, where scientific knowledge is produced not only by the pre-established actors provided by the criminal justice system (the law set), but also as political forums, where citizens, non-experts can make a claim.