Identifying Democracy

Abstract

In 1984, eight-year-old Paula Logares was called into a judge’s chambers and was told the man and woman she lived with were not her parents. Her parents had been disappeared during the dirty war, and now, through her blood, scientists would be able to return her to her birth family. Paula, thus, became the first “stolen” child in Argentina to be identified via the incipient technology of DNA identification. With this forensic first, DNA identification has emerged as a central tool of good governance the world round. From routine crime fighting to international criminal tribunals, DNA plays a crucial role in attempts to reckon with crimes of the body. As an alternative origin for forensic DNA, Argentina offers an early example of science emerging from social movements in the Global South. Drawing on twenty-seven months of fieldwork with family members, activists, and scientists, this article documents the ways in which DNA has emerged as a core site of subject formation for individuals and families affected by the terror of the dictatorship and for the Argentine nation-state, as it reckons with the legacies of repression. Through a feminist, postcolonial frame, I offer the concept of re(con)stitution as a way of attending to the forms of biocitizenship that emerge during times of humanitarian crisis and transitional justice. As a tool of reproductive governance, forensic DNA acts not only as a powerful disciplinary site of biocitizenship but also as a potential space to reimagine the social contract between the body, the public, and the state.

Keywords

forensic DNA transitional justice Latin America

Pichi had grown up with his grandparents. He couldn’t clearly remember his mother and father, but their story was more familiar than his own. If you asked Pichi about himself, he first spoke of his parents and tío and tía rehearsing their militancy in the Juventud Peronista, emphasizing their vision of a better world. Quickly he explained that although he knew their story, he had no direct memory of them. They had been disappeared in Argentina’s Dirty War. He counted himself lucky to have survived, knowing this history, knowing who he was. His cousin and brother were still missing, disappeared in their pregnant mothers’ bellies, born in captivity, kidnapped, and raised with another name and another history. Turning the familiar ritual of locating oneself in an extended kinship network into a ritual of memory and action, Pichi rehearsed the absences that populated his social world.

“Estoy buscando.”¹ “I am searching,” he explained, describing an action, but also a way of life in contemporary Argentina. Pichi, like thousands of other Argentines, men and women, young adults, and grandparents, was searching for a disappeared family member, in his case both his brother and cousin. They were alive, he assured me, but disappeared nonetheless. Part of an estimated 500 disappeared children, Pichi’s brother and cousin had been kidnapped by the Argentine military dictatorship and adopted into loyal families, many of them military and directly involved in the torture, detention, and assassination of the disappeared (Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo 1990). Although he longed to meet his missing family, Pichi explained that the greatest harm from this genocidal practice wasn’t his loss in not knowing his brother and cousin. “They don’t know who they are,” he said, looking down at the photos he was holding of his parents, from before their disappearance, young and alive. Happy. He explained that his cousin and brother had been robbed of a fundamental right, the right to identity (derecho a la identidad). He explained that the kidnapping of children from their biological families and placing them with new parents robbed them of the basic ability to know themselves, to be located in a kinship network, even if, as in the case of Pichi, that network was populated by absence.

Pichi began his public testimonials with the story of his parents as a reminder of the continued crime of their disappearance and the brutal repression of the world they had worked toward. His public appeals were part of his volunteer work with the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a family-based human rights nongovernmental organization that focused on recovering the identities of the approximately 500 disappeared children, who they name Nietos (grandchildren). He worked for the Comisión Nacional por el Derecho a la Identidad (National Commission for the Right to Identity [CONADI]), a government agency that acted as the official state counterpart to Abuelas, managing the judicial processes of identification in cases of the misappropriation of identity. He explained that in his memory and, equally importantly, in his body, he was a repository of these multiple missing, a living substitute for his devastated family tree. He had contributed his DNA to the National Genetic Data Bank and had worked tirelessly to convince other searching families and any youth with doubts to do the same. Later that evening, after a concert in the music series, Música por la Identidad, Pichi told his story once again, this time publicly, sounding his call for identity, for memory, for justice, and for DNA testing as the path to truth: “If you have doubts, call Abuelas. With a simple sample of blood and a DNA test you can know your identity with a 99.999% certainty.”²

This article focuses on the politics of DNA identification within human rights groups, primarily from the perspective of family members. Between 2005 and 2014, I conducted twenty-seven months of research with the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo; interviews with Nietos and other family members who have participated in DNA testing, data banking, and identification; and participant observation in genetic laboratories, Argentine court rooms, and in the Casa de las Abuelas working in the units focused on publicity, investigation, and identification. Through an analysis of public testimonials, institutional ties, and life histories, I show how narratives like Pichi’s relate the breakdown of family and generational ties to the breakdown of the Argentine state and its mechanisms of justice during and after the Dictatorship. In the case of Argentina, DNA has been offered as one answer to this breakdown. I argue that forensic DNA emerged used as an ordering tool for democracy. Order in the lives of Pichi and other family members was reestablished through practices designed to recapture the ordinary, a reconstructed family tree, a democratic and accountable state.

As the first country to mobilize a human rights movement around scientific methods of proof, specifically forensic anthropology and genetic science, Argentina offers a generative space to think through the links between identification and political subjectivity. I offer the concept of re(con)stitution as a way of highlighting the coproduction of scientific and political orders (Jasanoff 2004), where the individual restitution of identity is tied to national constitutions of democratic transition. By focusing on the use of DNA within transitional justice in Argentina, I argue that part of the power of the technology is its seeming ability to reconstruct and reconnect multiple levels of social life: the individual, the familial, and the national––categories which were violently ruptured during the violence and terror of the period. Drawing on the Abuelas’ concept of DNA identification as a form of restitution, I offer re(con)stitution as a way of highlighting DNA identification as a political mechanism for constituting postdictatorship democracy.

After a brief review of the postcolonial literature about Latin America, I review the history of violence in Argentina to show how the DNA-led reconstitutions, which are the focus of this article, are always in dialogue with the violent deconstitutions wrought by disappearance, murder, kidnapping, and the generalized terror of a brutal dictatorship. I then draw on interview data with identified Nietos to show how forensic DNA identification in Argentina became configured as a tool capable of answering the violences of the genocide through the biology of its victims. Seemingly private acts of identification can also be read as public interventions that result in modes of governance, justice, and accountability based in biological articulations of the self. I conclude by discussing biological citizenship and what can be learned by focusing on forensic DNA in the Global South, where multiple stakeholders articulate complex notions of identity, justice, family integration, and historical truth. Rather than focusing on individual or competing rights, this article explores identification, social repair, and forensic DNA in Argentina as constituting a tool for reproductive governance (Morgan and Roberts 2012). Through a postcolonial feminist reading of forensic DNA as a product of Americanity (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992), I suggest that DNA identification as reconstitution is a form of care that links identity, justice, and democracy.

A Laboratory for Democracy: Reproduction, Feminist Social Movements, and Postcolonialism in Argentina

Latin America poses a particular challenge for feminist postcolonial scholarship. With its early wave of independence movements in the nineteenth century, it has not fit easily within traditional paradigms of the postcolonial world. It has been paradigmatic of an indirect and pervasive neocolonialism, described by the historian Greg Grandin (2007) as a “workshop” for contemporary forms of imperialism based in economic exploitation and consistent politico-military intervention on the part of foreign nations, principally the United States.

Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein (1992) offer a postcolonial rereading of the Americas through the concept of “Americanity” as the paradigm for modernity. Rather than locating the emergence of modernity in Europe through a progress-driven account of technological development, they offer the Americas as the site for the imagination of modern technological, political, and cultural ways of being based on four core principles: coloniality, ethnicity, racism, and newness (p. 551). As is emphasized in the emerging scholarship from settler colonial studies (cf. Byrd 2011), colonialism in this theory remains the structuring grounds for political, affective, economic, and technological life. In Americanity, ethnicity and racism are the structuring forces of coloniality in everyday life, and a pervasive discourse of newness fuses a technologically and scientifically deterministic worldview with property regimes based in the land and labor appropriation of conquista.

From a feminist tradition, Chicana borderlands theorists like Gloria Anzaldua (1987) and Cherrie Moraga (Moraga and Anzaldua 1984) have theorized the Americas, particularly the borders created by conquest and settler colonialism, as generative, hybrid, violent, creative, powerful loci of a decolonial queering of the nation-state. Rather than locating the Americas as a footnote in the colonial project, or a margin, frontier, or border, these theorists offer the New World as the laboratory for colonialism, liberalism, and the modern nation-state (see also Anderson 1991).

Research on human genetics in society has focused primarily on settings in the Global North, focusing on the rise of “new social formations” and “biological citizenship,” including individual and collective “genetic identities” (Glasner, Atkinson, and Greenslade 2006; Heath, Rapp, and Taussig 2004; Kerr 2003; Petryna 2002; Rose and Novas 2008). Researchers have also worked to make visible the practices of determinism, stigmatization, and racialization mediated by DNA technologies (Duster 2003; Koenig, Lee, and Richardson 2008; Krimsky and Sloan 2011; Roberts 2012). These studies have interrogated the role of genetics in contemporary formations of identity and power in the Global North, focusing on emerging technologies like reproductive technologies (Franklin and Roberts 2006; Konrad 2005; Thompson 2005), genetic medicine (Montoya 2011; Taussig 2009; Whitmarsh 2008), laboratory research (Rabinow 2002), and criminal forensic DNA (Aronson 2007; Cole 2013; Duster 2006; Heinemann, Lemke, and Prainsack 2012; Lynch, Cole, and McNally 2008; M’charek 2008).

The growing research on genetics in postconflict settings has diagnosed forensics as potentially essentializing, eclipsing the important social work that individuals, communities, and scientists engage in to reckon with the violence of the past (Aronson 2011; Wagner 2008; Smith 2013). Other scholars have praised the technique, suggesting that DNA identification can form the core of an ethical commitment to truth and justice and even to the dead themselves (Rosenblatt 2015; Berra et al. 1986; Doretti and Snow 2009). Work on genetics and society in Latin America (Wade et al. 2014; Wade et al. 2015; Schwartz-Marín et al. 2015; Medina et al. 2014; García-Deister and Lopez-Beltran 2015) has focused on race, admixture, and essentializing discourses in genetic research and its role in reimagining the nation and biology of the region. By placing Latin America at the center of a narrative of scientific discovery (Medina et al. 2014), this article explores an alternative vision of forensic DNA technologies organized around social movements, kinship, and care (see also Pérez-Bustos, Olarte Sierra, and Diaz del Castillo 2014).

Theorists of care in science and technology studies have drawn on the concept to offer a feminist rereading of forms of articulation and connection that frame many interrogations of power in the field (Bellacasa 2011; Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015), offering an integration of subjectivity into spaces often configured as preeminently objective. In human rights, care has been understood in bifurcated terms, both as a necessary corrective to antagonistic discourses of hate and war and as a core discourse of modern liberal humanitarian reason (Reid-Henry 2014; Robinson 2011; Williams 2015). Following Foucauldian interrogations of biopower (Foucault 2003, 1978; Rose 2007), I seek to hold in tension theoretical critiques and valorizations of care with an ethnographic attention to the mobilization of care discourses within the gendered, revolutionary work of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.

Reproductive Governance and State Terror: The Family as a Site of National Remaking

Between 1976 and 1983, a military dictatorship in Argentina practiced widespread repression in the name of quelling suspected terrorists or subversives. A so-called dirty war was waged to politically reorganize the country and formed part of a continent-wide, US-supported, anticommunist proxy war during the Cold War (Esparza, Huttenbach, and Feierstein 2009; Grow 2012; Rabe 2011). The military and police “disappeared” approximately 30,000 young Argentine men and women, mostly leftist activists. The war against subversion was waged at the level of the family. Testimony from survivors collected in Nunca Mas (2003 [1985]), the report of the Argentine truth commission, documented that woman who were pregnant at the time of their disappearance were kept alive and forced to give birth in chains. In the most brutal cases, these women were given only moments with their newborn before the center’s medical staff took the baby away. The children were then given to military families to be raised, often to the very people responsible for torturing and murdering their birth parents. There are over 10,000 documented cases of disappearance and up to an estimated 20,000 more cases that remain undocumented because of the scarcity of survivors. Many families also remain afraid, ashamed, or even politically opposed to participating in justice processes.

Although reports of death flights (Verbitsky 1995)––a practice where the Disappeared were taken up in planes, drugged, and dropped in the Río de la Plata––and scientific excavations of collective graves and unmarked cemetery plots have documented the extermination of the Disappeared,³ their deaths remain a highly controversial issue (cf. E. Jelin and Kaufman 2002). As Pichi’s story of his search for family⁴ illustrates, the use of disappearance as a tactic of state terrorism violently disrupted the ordinariness of life, breaking apart the taken-for-granted nature of identity, personal safety, generational ties, and state legitimacy. Disappearance, the primary tactic of repression during this period, disrupted the most basic aspects of social life, creating an alien world where the traditional logics that governed daily life no longer functioned (Suarez-Orozco 1992; Armony, Menjivar, and Rodriguez 2005).

In the 1970s, movements on both the left and the right saw the family as the center of political possibility. Both the government and the militantes adopted pronatalist policies within their ranks (Alcoba 2008; Anguita and Caparrós 2006). This led to a unique political logic in Argentina, where the family, rather than a naturalized blood or racialized identity, was constructed as the primary means of political transmission. The Disappeared were demonized as subversives and terrorists that could be dealt with only through extermination; their children, however, were imagined as redeemable. Placed in “good” families they would become productive citizens of the new Argentine nation. This approach to social reorganization and change fits within a larger eugenic history in Argentina, which, unlike the ideological systems in the United States and Europe, focused on education and public sanitation as a means of improving the stock of the nation. Rather than extermination or sterilization, the country has a long history of viewing social programs and education as the primary tools for national improvement (Rodríguez 2006; Stepan 1991).

The process of transitional justice in Argentina has been complicated and continues into the present. With the return to democracy in 1983, the democratic government showed a strong commitment to justice, convening the first truth commission ever conducted in the world and trying and convicting the leaders of the military dictatorship (1985). This initial period of accountability was followed by wide-scale pardons and the institution of amnesty laws for a period of twenty years. With the economic collapse of 2001 and the election of Nestor Kirchner, succeeded by his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the pursuit of justice became a cornerstone of the Kirchnerista platform. In 2005, general amnesty laws limiting the scope and duration of prosecution were repealed, leading to the possibility of criminal trials for torture and disappearance. In the years since 2006 when these new trials began, there have been multiple high-profile convictions of torturers, military personnel, and political leaders.

In the international community, the repression was made famous in the figure of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. These were ordinary housewives who began protesting in the Plaza, demanding answers from the state about their disappeared children (Mellibovsky 1997; Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1993; Fisher 1989). Argentina is paradigmatic in its family-based politics. Most human rights groups are explicitly constituted in familial terms: Madres de Plaza de Mayo (mothers), Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (grandmothers), Herman@s (brothers/sisters), Hijos/Hijas por la identidad y justicia y contra el olvido y silencio (sons/daughters), Nietos (grandchildren). Identity, specifically a biogenetic tie to the Disappeared, has become central to a certain moral legitimacy in the public sphere (Jelin 2007). As feminist scholars have discussed (Bouvard 1994), it is not incidental that motherhood was the political center of the resistance to the dictatorship. By performing a kind of hyper-maternity, donning modest white headscarves, and clutching pictures of their missing children, women drew on the paternalist and nationalist framing of the state to make political claims, apolitically. In their role as compassionate mother to the dictatorial state’s punishing father, the Madres and Abuelas were able not only to occupy public spaces but also to draw national and international attention to the personal suffering caused by state violence. The Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo, the human rights organization on which this article centers, represents families who suffered a double loss—the loss of a grandchild alongside an adult child, either because the baby was taken with the mother or born in captivity. They have chosen to organize with the explicit goal to identify and be reunited with their grandchildren, rather than only with their children.

The Abuelas have spent the last thirty years proving that the kidnapping and adoption of children during the dictatorship was a systematic plan by the government to rupture natal families.⁵ The organization was the first to place scientific means of human identification, specifically DNA testing, at the center of their movement for justice.⁶ Their advocacy was responsible for the creation of the first National Genetic Data Bank in 1987, the Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos, created and maintained by the Argentine state under law 23511. Although it was created as an autonomous agency, it has operated with de facto input, technical and investigatory support, and oversight by the Abuelas and other family groups. They also advocated at the United Nations (UN) for a recognized right to identity, which was included as article eight UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and went into effect in 1990 (Stewart 1992). Their influence is visible in the language of the convention, where identity is defined explicitly in terms of name, nationality, and family relations; and secondly, the provision of assistance, protection, and the speedy return should that child have their identity illegally deprived.⁷ When Argentina signed on to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the executive branch created the CONADI, which is devoted to helping people determine their identities in explicitly biogenetic terms through the National Genetic Data Bank. Although the Abuelas are an NGO, during the Kirchner administration they have held highly visible posts in the Argentine government, with Nietos and other family members, like Pichi, working at CONADI and the Genetic Data Bank. In addition to these institutional ties, they have provided important symbolic capital to Kirchernismo, appearing in rallies and public venues in support of the government.

Nietos, who are identified via DNA testing, come to their birth identity through a number of processes. One is a massive public awareness campaign sponsored by the Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo that encourages all youths that have doubts about their identity and could have been born between 1975 and 1983 to come forward and have their DNA tested. The Abuelas organize musical, artistic, and theatrical events throughout Argentina as part of their network for identity (Red X Identidad). These concerts, comedy shows, plays, and art exhibits are designed to appeal to young people through popular cultural forms and to reach them with a message of return to “true” identity. At these events, the Abuelas appeal to young adults asking if they have doubts about their identity––Tenés Dudas? The Abuelas encourage those with doubts to come to the organization where, if they fit certain parameters, they will have their DNA tested at the National Genetic Data Bank. The emphasis in these public testimonies, like that given by Pichi, is on DNA as a return to truth. Juliana, a sister searching for her missing sibling, explained the connection between identification and democracy this way in a public testimonial: “It is our great debt as a society. There can never be democracy until each of these young people knows who they are.” The Abuelas offer DNA testing as both a right and a responsibility. Intermixing narratives about a lost national identity with those of a potentially discoverable individual identity, the Abuelas offer DNA testing as a privileged space for healing broken families, individual broken lives, and a broken nation-state.

There are also judicial mechanisms by which youths suspected of being children of the Disappeared are cited by judges as part of an investigation into the crimes of their adoptive parents. In these cases, they are ordered by the state to have their DNA tested to determine whether they are the children of the Disappeared, thereby proving their appropriating parents’ complicity in crimes against humanity. For many years, the compulsory route had been unsuccessful because cited young adults would refuse or flee the country. Judges often failed to extradite or extract blood under police escort, leaving cases languishing for years and even decades. During my initial fieldwork in 2006, the Abuelas began a new strategy focusing on shed DNA rather than the extraction of blood, which was understood by both the legal community and the public to carry a heavy moral weight. During this period, a combination of new methods of DNA analysis and broad governmental support for the prosecution of crimes from the dictatorship emerged. This shift in identification practices has been facilitated by a strategy of using warrants to search these youths’ houses and using latent biological material (clothes, toothbrushes, etc.) to obtain DNA without their cooperation. As one Abuela explained to me, this method she believed was much easier on the Nietos. This way they wouldn’t feel complicit in the prosecution of the parents who raised (kidnapped) them. In August 2009, the Supreme Court of Argentina upheld the validity of the use of warrants to obtain shed DNA (“Gualtieri Rugnone de Prieto” 2009). This overturned the standstill that had been created by the Vázquez Ferra case, where the court found in favor of one of the kidnapped children who refused to participate, indicating that she couldn’t be forced to give blood for a DNA analysis (Vázquez Ferrá, Evelin Karina s/ incidente de apelación 2003). In November of that same year, the legislature passed a much-debated law (ley 26549) to make DNA testing obligatory in cases of crimes against humanity (Ybarra 2009).

Through an analysis of interviews, it’s clear that the method by which young adults arrive at the door of the Genetic Data Bank has had important implications for how these young adults experience their birth identities and whether they eventually decide to meet their birth families. Not all Nietos choose to meet their birth families, change their names, or even submit to testing, as the contested cases of Evelyn Vázquez Ferra and Gualtieri Rugnone de Prieto show. Some refuse the process altogether; and others, like the Nieta quoted below, are willing to accept the results of the DNA test, affirming their birth identity, while still vindicating the actions of the dictatorship and condemning their birth parents as terrorists:

The first time they ordered me to go to the databank I refused. In my mind it was all a plot by the leftists to put my father in jail. A few years later, I realized it had to be done and went insisting that the bank was controlled by the guerrilleros and any result was a lie.

A few months later the judge called me in and told me that I was the daughter of Desaparecidos and I was so angry I began to scream at them. A woman police officer in the room looked at me with such pity and said, “look, these results are real. You have to accept the truth.” I stormed out and when I saw my husband in the hall I couldn’t even speak. My first words were, “soy hija de la subversión.” I am a child of subversion. I told him to take the children and leave me.⁸

She focused on her anger and shame at the biological connection to people she understood as dangerous threats to Argentina. She was one of the many identified young adults who initially rejected her birth family and her birth identity, praising the brave work of her adoptive military father in his war on subversion. However, as time passed, her ideas about identity shifted and changed, and she came to be an active participant in Abuelas, attending events, giving public speeches, and embracing her complex history. By 2010, the Nieta came to see the search for identity and the acceptance of her history as a necessary and valuable process and spoke publicly at Teatro X la Identidad, encouraging anyone with doubts to come forward and get their DNA tested. She described the coming to identity as a “hard and necessary step” and that it was her and “our” duty to history and to the nation to find out the truth (Nieta, Teatro X identidad, Public Testimonial, July 2010).

Another young woman, tested in her early twenties, described in an interview how with the genetic test her world fell apart. She had been ordered by a judge to go to the data bank and have her DNA tested. Several months later, he called her back to hear the results of the analysis. She was a child of the Disappeared. He immediately took her national ID card and passport and in the same breath told her that she could meet the family who had been searching for her. She told me she was too overwhelmed to spend time with them but briefly greeted them as she left the building to go home. When she arrived at her house, it was dark and her parents weren’t in. On the kitchen table, they had left a note saying that they had been arrested, accused of her kidnapping. She spent her first night as the birth daughter of disappeared parents alone.

When the judge called me in, he first asked for my identity documents and my passport and handed them to an officer who took them into another room. Then he handed me a thick stack of papers. I was the daughter of desaparecidos, he told me, and he handed me a report from the databank about my identity.

I can’t remember what I said or did or even how I managed to take the subte home. But when I got there my parents—my appropriating parents, I guess—were gone, arrested by the police. They had left everything in order, so they must have seen it coming. I came home to an empty house. (Nieta, Interview with author, March 2006)

Nietos who do embrace their birth identity often speak with pride about their search and their militancy, even if the path to that place had been fraught and long. For example, another Nieto, who now holds an elected position in the national government, had his DNA tested after he came to the Abuelas with doubts. In his story of identification, he emphasized that his own political awakening as well as his choice to read Nunca Más gave him the courage to ask hard questions. He began his story this way:

My mother was taken to ESMA where many of the pregnant detained women were held. They were taken there to give birth, and that’s how I was born there in ‘78, March of ‘78. Well, I was with her for 20 days and from there I went to La Marina, the ESMA belonged to the Navy. They gave me to a family of the dictatorship. Those people falsified my identity. They gave me an identity that they chose, and well, that’s how I came to grow up with that family. That family raised me, they lied to me, and I lived almost 26 years of my life with them. My doubts really took off when I calculated I was 15 and had the opportunity to read Nunca Más, the report of CoNaDeP. And I began. It really impacted me what I read.… taking it all into account, I [realized] I could be a child of the Disappeared (hijo de desaparecidos), and that they had hidden my identity. (Nieto, Interview with author, April 2006)

For each identified Nieto, the search for identity is tied to a criminal case into kidnapping. If a young adult is found to be a child of the Disappeared, the people that raised him or her are indicted of kidnapping and forced disappearance. The Nietos have no say in the prosecution of the parents who raised them because these cases are understood as crimes against humanity, not civil matters. Although the Abuelas have been critiqued for linking identifications and restitution to prosecution, they staunchly refuse to reframe genocidal kidnapping as adoption. Based on interview data, the prosecution of the individuals that raised these Nietos is the most challenging part of the process of recovery, as many, but not all, feel profound love and care for the people that raised them. The relatively few young adults who have been identified––119 of 500 as of April 2016—speaks to the effectiveness of kidnapping and adoption as a tool of genocide at the individual, familial, and societal levels. The people who raised them often feel like family––like parents, not kidnappers. Care and love in the service of genocide, as much as violence and death, have marked the long road of reconstitution in Argentina.

In Argentina, the discourse on both the right and the left––those who seek justice and those who would vindicate the Dirty War as a war against terror—has remained heavily polarized. Nietos describe their sense of having to take a side, which is staked out explicitly through the work of subjectivity. It is enacted in the choice of words they use to describe themselves and their families: adoptive versus appropriating parents (padres adoptivos vs. apropiadores), Nieto versus the son or daughter of a particular person, identity versus the results of the analysis. Identity, at a rhetorical level, was often reduced to the results of a genetic test, ignoring the complexity of the category, especially in the context of adoption as genocide. In this genetic ideology, truth emerged in the moment of identification. However, given that the dictatorship saw identity as malleable and child abduction and adoption as a tool of national ideological reform, this Abuelas stance can be understood as a refusal on the part of family members of an attempt to normalize a politics of genocide based in the literal social construction of the family.

In her ethnography of amniocentesis, Rayna Rapp (1999) develops the concept of moral pioneers to emphasize how new genetic technologies, as opposed to earlier eugenic moments, leave much of the work of reconciling meaning and identity in the hands of individuals and families. She suggests that affected people in these difficult situations are placed in the position of impromptu “moral pioneers” and “moral philosophers of the private” (p. 306) in the face of the complex ethical choices that the technology presents. A similar burden of meaning making falls onto Nietos. In their response to the results, they seek to locate themselves in the midst of the ideological divide that still pervades Argentine public life. As the stories of the Nietos show, probabilistically matching an individual to a genetic family tree does not begin to answer the enormous and painful consequences of systematic, state-sponsored torture, murder, and appropriation. As a result, the daily choices that the Nietos make in the aftermath of an identification become symbols of accountability and justice.

The historical and political pressures that led to DNA identification as the primary means of resolving disappearance and appropriation also shifted, at least in part, the locus of responsibility for transition and justice onto the bodies of its victims, the Nietos. The Nietos take on a dual role. They struggle with a pluralistic and complicated notion of identity. Yet it is in their bodies and lives that transitional justice is being worked out. As they told me in interviews, in the face of a positive DNA match they must ask formidable questions: Who is a terrorist? What is the meaning of family? Who am I and who will I be in this world? Rather than the end of a political struggle, the DNA test result often represents the beginning of a much longer struggle for Nietos, but one that they are forced to reconcile as individuals through their affective ties and choices about advocacy.

Re(con)stitution: Identification, Transitional Justice, and Citizenship

DNA testing administered by the Argentina state via the National Genetic Data Bank purports to answer a number of ontological questions: Who am I? Who is this child of contested parents? Where do I belong? In Argentina and many other countries torn apart by violence, the individual, the family, and the nation are precisely the categories that have been ruptured through the practices of repression. Although feminist scholarship and the Nietos and Abuelas themselves have shown that the individual, the family, and the nation are constantly imagined, created, and contested, in policy settings, DNA identification has become a symbol for healing through its power to reconnect these systems of belonging—literally to genealogically connect a searching mother and the bones of her child or a grandmother and her kidnapped grandchild. It is constructed as offering some kind of an answer to this crisis of meaning making generated by disappearance. If torture and repression shattered citizens’ abilities to trust in the state to fulfill its basic functions, a DNA test administered and legitimated by the state purports to make whole what was torn asunder. With the test results, those who had been disappeared are restored to their individual identities, families are offered visible proof of their integrity, and the state demonstrates that it can, in fact, recognize its citizens. I suggest that this seemingly seamless linking, although often fraught in practice, offers a window into the logics of both transitional justice and the growing popularity of forensic DNA within it.

Scholars of the nation-state have argued that one of its defining features is the identification of subjects as individual citizens. Techniques of identification like the passport, ID card, fingerprint, and now DNA have a privileged relationship to modern modes of governance. They betray the intimate relationship between processes of identification and the rise of the modern nation-state and by extension the modern citizen. To be a citizen of a nation-state requires identification through registries, certificates, ID cards, passports, and the like (Caplan and Torpey 2001). The modern nation-state distinguishes itself through legibility (Scott 1998), through its capacity to account for, surveil, and discipline (Foucault 1979) its citizens. Paired with this is an evolving discourse of transparency and efficiency that links a state’s apparent openness and clarity to its claims of democratic accountability (Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Hetherington 2011). In contrast, even in its name Argentina’s Dirty War reveals the opacity and murkiness of the period. The state targeted ordinary citizens as subversives and threats to the polity and made them disappear into thin air. A generalized terror wielded through doublespeak, misidentification, and intense surveillance (Feitlowitz 1998) was understood as the necessary ground for a grand transformation of society, known officially as the process of nation reorganization (el Proceso). With the return to democracy and the rise of a politics of justice, identification has emerged as a privileged site for the performance of transitional justice and democratic accountability.

Although this linking of democracy and DNA identification emerges from specific Argentine historical trajectories, the questions this linking raises are indicative of a wider social process that many argue is transforming industrialized societies—a shift to a biological citizenship where the relationship to the state is increasingly based on biopolitical claims (Rose 2007; Petryna 2002; Pollock 2015). Argentina offers a theoretically provocative example of biological citizenship because DNA identification is framed as a fundamental right of the citizen, where genetic technologies act as guarantors of a person’s right to identity as an individual, a member of a family, and a citizen. This is in contrast to the discourses of surveillance and crime prevention that are common in forensic applications of DNA and those of individual autonomy and research ethics that guide basic research with human subjects and genetics. This linking of transitional justice, identification, and kinship can also be read as a kind of bioconstitutionalism, where new biotechnologies coproduce new legal and political systems of meaning (Jasanoff 2011). In the case of the Abuelas, it would seem that it is not only biotechnology driving this shift but also the emergence of new brutal forms of domination and terror, like disappearance, which create the grounds for DNA to emerge as a privileged answer. In this article, I offer the concept of re(con)stitution to highlight this interplay of biotechnology, transitional justice, and democracy. In the case of Argentina, DNA is reconstitutional: offering individual restitution in the form of biogenetic identification, and at the same time constitutional of new modes of postviolence reckoning. Moreover, this reconstitutional work is both constructive and destructive, as vividly illustrated in the process of identification, restitution, and meaning making faced by the Nietos and Abuelas.

Through a close attention to the coproduction of forensic genetics (as a reliable and stable scientific technology) and to postconflict justice (as a mode of response to the brutal nature of cold war repression and violence in Latin America), I document the construction of the technology as a tool which in a single test result purports to offer answers to the most pernicious suffering of counter-insurgency warfare. By bringing together state-based recognition of individual identity, family affiliation, and national belonging, DNA is invoked as a master molecule capable of holding together both essentially and timelessly that which was so violently torn apart. As we see in the cases of Nietos described above, DNA identification reconstitutes their realities. Their individual identities are changed as they are legally given the names of their birth, their genealogies are rearticulated as they are connected to missing parents and searching siblings and grandparents, and their citizenship is reconfirmed through the power of the courts to enact DNA as form of justice and a visible commitment to democratic accountability. For many searching family members, DNA emerges as a site outside of politics, an ontological space of truth-making untouched by the brutality of disappearance, torture, kidnapping, and even death. In this articulation of biological citizenship, identity and biology become increasingly linked. To be a full citizen––and more importantly for Argentina to be a fully modern nation-state––the government must be able to recognize each person as a member of the polity, not only as a unique individual but also as a member of a particular family. Moreover, this recognition is not understood to be bureaucratic but rather to be based on something more essential, an immutable notion of a lifelong identity inscribed in one’s genealogy, often practically manifested in the analysis of genes.

In the Abuelas’ original statement of purpose, they enumerate life, identity, and family as fundamental rights. In their use of genetics and its articulation in the lives of Nietos, biological citizenship reconciled via DNA fixes these firmly in place. By demanding the priority of these rights over others, and seeking their fulfillment in DNA testing, the Abuelas have linked democracy with a biological citizenship, where life, identity, and family are radically and essentially constituted in one’s genes as an indelible record of affective connections. However, it is limiting to understand this shift in the social contract as propelled primarily by the reproductive politics and family-based organizing of the Abuelas. At the center of the problematic reduction of identity faced by the Nietos are larger and longer histories of the discursive and ideological power of genetics. Much of the writing about the Abuelas and the Nietos has been framed in ethical terms, asking about competing rights and who has the power to define identity. Is “restitution” an act of justice or an imposition of biological reductionism? A feminist reading of the limits of these frames points to the importance of reproduction as a state-based practice of population-making, especially in times of conflict (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Strathern 1992).

In conclusion, I point to future directions for these questions of DNA identification and a new, quite literal, politics of identity based in women’s organizing in the Global South. I have shown how forensic DNA is a product of Americanity, embedded and produced in Argentina as well as in the Global North. The configuration of this technology as it is employed within paradigms of transitional justice is located in and marked by the concerns, histories, exclusions, and violences of the region as much as by those of the Global North. In situations of transitional justice, a search for order––be it ordered lives or an ordered state—is often the explicit goal of the transition. Through a feminist, postcolonial attention to the geographic and epistemic borderlands of genetic technologies, I highlight how forensic DNA as tool of reconstitution sits uncomfortably in the borderlands of the transition between war and peace, the violation and performance of political and economic rights, and systems of surveillance and affective regimes of care. I offer the concept of reconstitution as a way of linking political constitutions (democracy, justice) with physical restitutions (bodies, missing children) and resisting narratives of reconnection, repair, and return that pervade the normative literature of transitional justice (McAdams 1997; Elster 2004; Teitel 2000). Rather, something altogether different, partial, and negotiated emerges in the frictions between technology, subjectivity, family, terror, and the state.

Processes of identification have played an integral part in the creation of postrupture fictions of order, because, unlike memory or testimonio, science has had a privileged position in relationship to ontology––the is of the contested past. In Argentina, DNA has become a primary technical tool for reconciling the atrocities of the past. In an unassailable technical test, essential connections are made. Grandmothers finally know the location of their long missing grandchildren. Mothers and sons and daughters have the opportunity to bury their loved ones and, as many have told me, have the comfort of a site to place a flower and remember. Nonetheless, the emotional work behind these connections via science is depoliticized and personalized, as we see in the stories of the Nietos. These experiences may be hallmarks of reconstitutional citizenship––a new relationship to the state that can be satisfying in its intimacy and recognition and at the same time atomizing, entrepreneurial, and tied to greater surveillance and control. The multiple avenues of social organizing, mobilization, and care that have marked the Abuelas and now the Nietos as a social movement can help resist a narrative of biological citizenship as only existing within a negative teleology. The experience of the Nietos and Abuelas can also point to the creative and generative possibilities within modes of reconstitution for expanded conceptions of identity, family connection, state recognition, and ultimately a sense of justice.

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

The article benefited immensely from the feedback of participants in the following spaces, where it was presented: The “Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies” seminar funded by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) at the University of Michigan, The Irvine Department of Anthropology Speaker Series, and the University of California Humanities Center Seminar on Necropolitics. Many thanks to Anne Pollock and Banu Subramaniam, the special issue editors, ST&HV editors, and anonymous reviewers for the feedback, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico and the Institute for Genetics and Society at the University of California-Los Angeles for institutional support.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Gr. 7384) and the National Institutes of Health, National Human Genome Research Institute (R01HG005702-01).

Notes

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