The missing,the martyred and the disappeared: Global networks,technical intensification and the end of human rights genetics

Argentina, 1984: Politically engaged genetics

In 1985, a National Genetic Databank ⁴ was established in Argentina, one of the first genetic databanks in the world. It emerged from a unique collaboration between members of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo searching for relatives, activist students and a team of researchers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The 1984 scientific mission from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) included the renowned US geneticist Mary-Claire King, the Chilean geneticist Christian Orrego, and one of the world’s leading experts on forensic anthropology, Clyde Snow of the US. They worked with local counterparts, including anthropology and biology students who later went on to become world experts in their own right, people such as Mimi Doretti, a forensic anthropologist, and Victor Penchezadeh, a geneticist. Local family members, for whom all of the scientists understood themselves to be working, were key partners in this scientific endeavor. This emergent assemblage of forensic science also relied on the material contributions of family members and victims for testimony, archival documentation, database construction and bodies and blood for analysis.

This assemblage of forensic science emerged in response to the human rights abuses of Argentina’s 1976–1983 military dictatorship, during which communities of activists and intellectuals were targeted by repressive forces waging a brutal cold-war counter-insurgency campaign to eradicate the perceived threat of communism in the country. An estimated 30,000 men, women and children were forcibly disappeared, coming to be known as los desaparecidos, the Disappeared (CONADEP, 2003). The so-called ‘Dirty War’ was waged through the use of extra-judicial detention-centers, torture, and kidnapping. Habeas corpus, the demand for governmental acknowledgement of prisoners, became the grounds of human rights resistance to cold-war ideologies, placing the physical body and its remains at the center of organizing. During my fieldwork in 2006, at the 30^th anniversary of the military coup, activist groups continued to carry pictures of the Disappeared with the slogan, aparición con vida (bring them back alive). Even in the full knowledge of death, activists continue into the present to demand an accounting of the lives and deaths of the victims of the military dictatorship.

Arriving in Buenos Aires shortly after the return to democracy, Orrego and King worked with The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group organized to find children kidnapped by the military dictatorship during the clandestine detention of their activist parents. King and Orrego drew on biostatistics and the emerging field of paternity testing to develop a way to use biological material, in this early period human leukocyte antigen (HLA) testing, to establish kinship relationships between searching families and these children, despite the ‘disappearance’ of a parental generation. Snow trained local students to conduct archeologically rigorous excavations, helping to found the first forensic anthropology team in the world, El Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forense (EAAF). Prior to the development of this new network of academic scientists, students and family members, Argentine activists had encountered little success in creating legal evidence of the crimes of the dictatorship. Although excavations of mass graves had shocked the public in the days right after the fall of the dictatorship, they were done violently with bulldozers, mixing bodies together and destroying evidence. Snow described this as terrible loss:

They were losing evidence, which is as bad as being an accomplice to the crime. Every bone, every tooth can tell you something. We pointed out that the thing to do was to stop these mass exhumations and use an archaeological approach (Quoted in Green, 1986).

The EAAF became the most prominent international organization dedicated to post-conflict identification, developing an explicit ethical and collaborative approach to human identification. In an interview with one of their founding leaders, Luis Fondebrider, he described to me the pitfalls of the earliest days of forensic anthropology and the lessons learned during his 30 years of practice. He emphasized two important legacies of the founding of the EAAF. First, the EAAF was founded on an explicit ethical relationship to family members and with an unwavering political recognition of the violence of the state. These two realities, in his view, necessitated a forensics that could act independently of the state. After our interview, he shared with me a slide show he used to educate NGOs interested in forensic work, where he described these two tenets of their work: (1) ‘Family members, as well as their communities, must be considered a central and fundamental part of the investigatory process before, during, and after it’ (emphasis in original) and (2) ‘From the sixties to the present, thousands of people have been kidnapped, tortured, and killed because of processes of political, and ethnic violence, as well as religious violence. States have been the principle agents of these crimes’.

Like the young anthropologists that became the EAAF, the Grandmothers had also worked tirelessly to locate and identify the Disappeared. The Grandmothers focused their efforts on identifying their missing grandchildren born in captivity or disappeared alongside their parents. Shortly after the fall of the military junta, the Grandmothers were able to locate some of the children they believed to be their kidnapped grandchildren. In an interview with Nélida Navajas, who was the first Secretary of the Grandmothers, she described to me the early investigations of the Grandmothers. People from the community would come to them in the Plaza as they circled in front of the Casa Rosada to report a case of a suspicious child. For example, someone would tell them the story of a neighbor, an older woman, who had never been pregnant, who went away for a few weeks and returned with a baby that she claimed as her own. Then the Grandmothers would begin their investigations:

we would go to the street where the family lived and later several Grandmothers got the idea of going to the house with advertisements for products for babies … we would ring the doorbell, recommend the product, and then ask if there were babies in the house.

Despite the information they gathered and their own experiential certainty on seeing these babies, they were faced with the difficulty of proving this in a court of law. With the help of the transnational team of scientists, they turned to modern genetics to help. Rosa Rosinblat, then the Vice-President of the Grandmothers, explained in an interview that when she heard about genetics and it gave her hope for their cause:

We knew that there was some kind of test available to prove paternity in cases where the father tried to deny his responsibility. But it was the only kind of test that existed. We said to ourselves, ‘no, there has to be something. We can’t keep going to the judge and say look, he looks exactly the same as my child did’. But in all the trips we did in the most important centers of Europe they would say to us that a paternity test required a mother and a father. No. No. No. Finally, in the United States we went to the Blood Center of New York. At that time Dr. Fred Allen was the director. … So we asked him our question and he saw how desperate we were and said, ‘give me some time and I will look into it. We will do something’.

King and Orrego, like Snow, began to work with Argentine immunologist Dr. Ana María di Lonardo at the Durand Hospital in Buenos Aires. Di Lonardo proved helpful, collaborating with the team and allowing them to use her fully equipped lab to carry out the identification work (see also Arditti, 1999). In 1984, the group published a paper in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine & Pathology that described diverse technologies that could be used to prove grandpaternity with a 99.9% accuracy rate:

The most useful system for this analysis is HLA, although other genetic markers including blood groups, red cell enzymes, plasma proteins, and DNA polymorphisms can be tested to provide adequate information in families with only one or two living grandparents (Di Lonardo et al., 1984).

This marked one of the first interventions by science into human rights and one of the first scientific tests developed as a result of layperson advocacy. ⁵

First in Argentina and later in response to conflicts throughout the region, groups like the Grandmothers and the EAAF began to form to do the work of identification outside of state authority. State criminological services during the conflicts of the Cold War in Latin America were most often allied with repressive forces. They often falsified data and colluded with repressive forces to bury victims in unmarked graves. Post-mortem analysis and identification, a central locus of state authority to regulate life and death, became a tool of repression. In Argentina, family members described receiving boxes with bones or bone fragments from the government stating that these were the bodies of their missing children and indicting them for crimes against the nation. For example, Beatriz Rubenstein, a mother actively involved in organizing, was sent a box containing a skull and bone fragments along with the following note from a Commander Condor: ⁶

Dear Madam,

In response to your incessant search for your daughter Patricia, we have decided to send you part of her remains which should satisfy your anxiety to be reunited with your daughter. … In case you were unaware …, we are listing the crimes that she committed with her husband Carlos Francesco:

- Betrayal of her country

- Concealing the enemy

- Collaborating actively with Montonero assassins

For these reasons she was condemned to death. May God have mercy on her soul (Quoted in Bouvard, 1994: 140).

Most of these remains were later proven to be falsifications, thanks to the forensic analyses of the newly formed activist forensic teams. However, as this example illustrates, the ideological stakes of state violence were fought in the nebulous space between disappearance and death. By taking up the technologies of the state – the investigation of disappearance and death, the location and excavation of remains, and the post-mortem documentation of violence, and individual identification – these young activist-scientists and family groups highlighted the explicit failure of the state to meet its most basic responsibilities to its citizens.

Although what I term human rights forensics had its origins in Argentina, this type of politically engaged forensic work became widespread during this period. In addition to the groups already discussed, similar groups were created in Guatemala, Peru, Chile, Colombia and El Salvador. Non-governmental forensic groups have also formed in other regions of the world that have experienced widespread repression, most prominently in South Africa (Aronson, 2011) and the countries of the former Yugoslavia, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina (Wagner, 2008).

Guatemala, 2010: Technologies of repair

In the twenty-five years since the development of forensic anthropology and forensic genetic testing in Argentina, there has been an increasing standardization of post-conflict reconstruction efforts. Large-scale, multi-faceted projects such as the international response in the former Yugoslavia have served as exemplars of intervention (cf. Holohan, 2005). Teams of scientists and policy makers in the international aid community have emerged as global experts on how best to rebuild and repair, from identifying the dead to promoting democracy (Coles, 2007; Redfield, 2008). For example, in the rebuilding of Iraq, Bosnian geneticists trained Iraqi forensic specialists, American physician groups documented war crimes and US consulting companies brought in tools for democracy promotion developed in El Salvador. Despite the breadth and diversity of this network, in practice, an international toolkit of reconstruction and repair has emerged, equipped with a standard package of scientific, political and legal technologies. Techniques and technologies developed in multiple disasters have become packaged together as set of ‘best practices’ for reconstruction and repair. In this section, to illustrate the shifts in forensic science and global post-conflict repair, I describe the Latin American Initiative to Identify the Disappeared (LIID) or the Iniciativa Latinoamericano para Identificar a las personas Desaparecidas (ILID), a politico-scientific partnership to use DNA technologies to identify the disappeared of Argentina, Peru, and Guatemala (Weitz et al., 2009).

In 1998, the United States Congress approved a new funding infrastructure within the State Department, the Human Rights Democracy Fund (HRDF). Described as ‘venture capital’ for democracy, the HRDF promoted an explicit financial risk model for democratization, emphasizing investment in risky projects with high potentials for dividends. In 2008, the HRDF funded the LIID, aimed at creating forensic DNA laboratories within Latin American NGOs to collect bodies of the disappeared and blood samples from searching families and use large-scale DNA typing to match as many as possible. In my discussions with US State Department officials, they emphasized that the program was able to gain widespread internal support by appealing to both the interests of those promoting human rights and those with a safety and criminal justice focus. The development of laboratories and trained experts would allow for accountability and justice to be increased in these countries as a result of widespread genetic identification following state-sponsored atrocities, and that development also would create forensic science capacity for future crime control. Although the grant created state-of-the-art non-governmental forensic laboratories, the project’s trajectory saw these laboratories eventually coming under national state control, thus creating strong government forensic services in countries throughout the region. This capacity building in forensic science, generally falling within the broader rubric of science diplomacy, has been a central development platform for the US State Department and USAID in the post 9/11 period, creating labs and training local scientists not only in Latin America but also in Nepal, Cyprus and Libya. In this sense, the LIID is part of broader initiatives that link technology, democracy and development with the goal of offering a neo-liberal security partner to the donor country – an especially important strategic goal in the US War on Terror.

I point below to the ways that this new politics of development and security has significantly shifted the networks underlying forensic DNA. The laboratory on which I focus was created by the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) in 2008. The FAFG had been an offshoot of Snow’s work in the region and was established by a group of local students trained by the EAAF during the Civil War to document the genocide of an estimated 200,000 people, primarily ethnic Mayans (Proyecto Interdiocesano Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, 1999). This early stage of the Foundation was an exemplar of the ways in which scientific networks were being established throughout Latin America and the world. A team of international scientists came to the site of crisis and trained local students, rather than police officers or government officials. A small, non-profit and locally trained forensic team was established to work full-time on the grave human rights abuses of the country in collaboration with family groups.

However, by 2008, more than twelve years after the 1996 peace accords that ended Guatemala’s ‘Civil War’, the organization struggled to secure consistent funding for its efforts to identify the victims of state-sponsored genocide. While the Argentine science-based human rights organizations described in the section above have gone on to secure consistent funding from the state, the FAFG has had to contend with the Guatemalan state, which has been charged with ongoing complicity with the atrocities of the civil war. The FAFG director explained in an interview ⁷ that in partnering with the Latin American Initiative to Identify the Disappeared, the FAFG’s goal was to create a state-of-the-art forensic laboratory in the Global South. Rather than outsourcing genetic testing to international, for-profit laboratories like Bode Cellmark Forensics, they saw this capacity building as a third space for forensics, outside of the privatization of commercial interests and the impunity and indifference of corrupt states. The director hoped that the laboratory and its staff would be primarily focused on human rights and humanitarian cases, thereby acting as a regional training and justice center committed to transparency, rule of law, and transnational democracy.

The FAFG DNA laboratory is located in the remnants of a once-luxurious house in a crumbling zone of Guatemala City. With its bustle, guards, and late model cars parked along the street, the laboratory at the time of my fieldwork was visually striking in contrast with the struggling neighborhood. A video intercom system allowed access to the lobby, where a secretary sat behind bulletproof, opaque glass. These layers of security and militarization were increasingly common in a city characterized by some of the highest levels of violence in the world. Most stunning was the use of biometrics to control access to the laboratory and office space. Each time a worker entered or left the space, they were required to enter a code and scan their thumbprint to open the otherwise electronically locked door. The biometrics acted both as security and as a kind of punch card for hours worked, to show the diligence and accountability of the organization.

The director emphasized that the DNA laboratory was a point of considerable pride for the Foundation. For visitors and new arrivals at the Foundation, the tour of the laboratory was a central part of coming to know the work of the place. The laboratory was presented as the center of the Foundation’s transitional justice project, although another obligatory visit was to the large open-pit excavations that the organization was conducting at a large public cemetery in Guatemala City, La Verbena. The architecture of the lab, like many forensic spaces, was constructed to be viewed, with large picture windows allowing visitors to peer into each of the nine rooms to watch laboratory staff process skeletal samples recovered from excavations throughout Guatemala. As I began participant observation in the laboratory in 2010, the lab director explained that the Foundation had invested in the latest DNA analysis systems, including genetic analyzers capable of doing STR and SNP analysis and real-time PCR machines. The genetics team had also spent two grueling years taking the unique step among international forensic laboratories of becoming accredited, making theirs the only accredited forensic lab in the country.

In contrast to their earliest work in Highland Mayan villages, the current project associated with LIID used new techniques developed in criminology to gather information about the dead and their whereabouts. The new director of the recently inaugurated criminology division explained that they would be using the latest best practices in criminalistics to interview families and generate ante-mortem data. The laboratory even hoped to develop standard operating procedures for their interviews with family members, bringing that process to the same level of clinical rigor as DNA analysis. Family members remained an integral part of ceremonial events, but they were not understood as partners and knowledge producers in their own right.

The Foundation, now funded by the LIID and focused on genetics, although headed by many of the same individuals from those early years and still existing outside of state control, had a very different feel and focus from the Argentine NGOs that I described earlier. The organization did not promote political solidarity as a core value of its workers, focusing instead on professionalism and scientific practice. Politics was seen as a liability. The Guatemalan scientists evinced a neutrality about their victims, suggesting that theirs had been a civil war with casualties on both sides and their role was simply to identify all people recovered. This was in the face of public acknowledgement that the army and state security forces killed 93% of the victims of the civil war and that 83% of those killed were indigenous Mayans (Proyecto Interdiocesano Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, 1999). One recent biology graduate, who worked as a DNA analyst, explained that the occasional cases where they consulted on current murders for the government were his favorite. He felt that it was most similar to CSI, which he enjoyed watching on television. When I asked about the genocide and his feelings about the massacred, he said he didn’t know much about it, having not studied it in school. He remembered that at his orientation for FAFG he had to watch a documentary, When the Mountains Tremble, but he explained, using a loaded term to characterize Mayan victims, that the guerrilleros weren’t the only victims of the war. Although his response was somewhat of an outlier, for most technicians concern about Guatemala’s genocide held little sway in their decision to work in this field. The promise of well-paying jobs as scientists as well as the ability to conduct DNA analysis in their own country was their primary motivation.

The Hague, 2013: Depoliticizing genetics

Returning to The Hague: speaker after speaker during ‘The Missing’ conference emphasized the utility of a universal approach to human identification. From the Chief of Interpol to the Director of the International Organization for Migration, each presenter praised the important work of post-war and post-disaster identification efforts in guaranteeing the ‘right to truth’. ⁸ They lauded an effort to move beyond human rights settings to apply DNA-led identification efforts universally and equally in cases of natural disasters, migration, domestic crime, extra-state violence and terrorism. As many of the law-enforcement and scientific specialists explained, the scientific and investigatory processes were identical, making it logical to treat situations objectively and independently of political context. A central refrain at the conference was the universalizing claim that all people, regardless of the circumstances of their loss, should have a guaranteed right to know the fate of their loved ones. ICMP commissioner and former Norwegian Ambassador to the United States Knut Vollebaek summed up this legal approach in his closing remarks on the conference: ‘I dare to say that, today, the right to know the truth, the right to justice and the right to an effective investigation are guarantees that are expected of states’.

Presentations included topics as diverse as the post-9/11 identifications, migration-related disasters such as the 2012 boat capsizing near Lampedusa in Italy, unidentified dead from aviation accidents, missing children, sex-worker registries, mass graves in Libya and drug war-related deaths in Mexico. The official program was carefully constructed to highlight the unifying thread running through these diverse political, institutional, and legal cases: forensic DNA. It was not the similarity of experience that bound these various missing together, but the power of a scientific tool for rendering them identified. ICMP, which pioneered a DNA-led investigation of mass-fatalities, used the event to announce its upcoming relocation from Bosnia to the Netherlands to form a new centralized, internationally sanctioned and certified DNA laboratory, allied directly with Interpol and housed in the vicinity of the International Criminal Court. Although the director of ICMP emphasized that older small-scale team-based approaches were still needed and valuable, the conference, taken as a whole, made a compelling case for a centralized, formal institution dedicated to forensic genetics and directly allied with the international community. A new era for international justice, based in the latest technologies of genetics, would both establish the truth of identity and act as its guarantor through the new laboratory’s impartiality, accessibility and global reach.

Despite the power of this vision and its seeming rationale and appropriateness as delegates sat in the library of the International criminal court, a problem remained visible. Many of the stakeholders at the meeting passionately disagreed with this vision. A survivor of Srebrenica, one of the women whom Queen Noor had credited with teaching the world best practices in post-conflict identification, was the first to speak at the question and answer period. With much fanfare, the moderator pointed to her, modestly dressed in the front row, saying how appropriate that a widow from Srebrenica should be the first to comment. Speaking in Bosnian, through a translator, she began immediately to talk about politics, directly contradicting the universalist vision presented. She expressed her disappointment that Milosevic died in prison without justice and hinted at the failure of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia to adequately address the genocide at Srebrenica. Looking around the room, she turned to the many dignitaries and representatives of international institutions and foreign nations, appealing directly to them. She wanted to know what responsibility the international community bore in the genocide. Was there a way to hold European nations and their peacekeepers responsible for sitting by and doing nothing as her husband and sons were led away and murdered? How could they trust the international government after they had allowed the genocide to happen in a UN safe zone? Scenes like this repeated themselves throughout the event. Dignitaries stood to laud the rule of law and the capacity of the UN and international organizations to universally, credibly, and scientifically identify the dead. During question and answer sessions, representatives from countries including Iraq, Syria, Libya and Mexico pointed to the international community’s failure to address violence in their homelands. Given their abdication of intervention and human rights for the living, how would these same institutions be able politically to address the identification of the dead and missing?

After the presentation by William L. Swing, the director of the International Organization for Migration, in which he highlighted the potential for the use of DNA in response to the dangers and deaths faced by many economic migrants, several audience members raised the question of whether better tracking and identification of the dead was the best use of limited funds. What would happen if this same money were used for development, or to create more safety and rights for migrants? United States Ambassador Thomas Miller, the moderator, politely dismissed these questions by indicating these were laudatory goals but neither possible nor the focus of this event. Radwan Ziadeh, a transitional justice scholar working at the Damascus Center for Human Rights, highlighted the paradox of a new identification regime under the auspices of the international legal community. In the midst of a PowerPoint presentation in which Ziadeh described his important collaborations with scientists in Iraq, Libya and even Chile, he flipped to an image of a dead boy in a blue shirt surrounded by the rubble of Dariya and told the audience in a tightly controlled voice that this was his cousin, Muhammad, who was killed on the 27^th of August, 2012. Speaking of his experience he said: ‘It is so difficult for you to deal with the issues. You never think that’s going to happen in your hometown, that even in your family. Even what was more shocking, the response from the international community … you think that what’s happened in Srebrenica, what’s happened in Rwanda, will never happen again. But what happened in Syria is a different story, [showing us] that what has happened will happen again and again’.

The ICMP conference highlighted many of the major debates occupying activists, scientists and government agents involved in human rights genetics. What is the proper relationship between objectivity and activism? How should family members be involved in identification work, as active participants in knowledge production or merely as sample donors and sources of ante-mortem information? Should identification work occur at a single, centralized, international laboratory or in individual nation-states? What happens when all types of events where DNA is useful in identification get lumped into a single political project? The meeting’s conveners offered one answer to those questions: centralization and depoliticization. The dissent voiced by many attendees sheds light on the stakes of this shift in human rights forensics for those involved. Rather than understand ‘The Missing’ as a new beginning for forensic genetics (although it was clearly aimed as an agenda-setting event), instead I suggest that it represented part of an ongoing transformation in the basic constitution of scientific work in these settings. The conference acted as an intervention into the current network, attempting to abandon or cut off particular nodes in favor of new attachments and alignments.

Technification and the end of human rights genetics

Rather than offer a seamless history of the emergence and end of human rights genetics, I have offered three images of its development to highlight the particular form the networks have taken over a thirty-year period. If Argentina and the AAAS team’s establishment of a family-centered, citizen-scientists model of human rights genetics in the 1980s can be taken as the beginning of human rights genetics, twenty-five years later this model had shifted significantly, in the form of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation funded by the LIID. At ‘The Missing’, we see the ongoing processes by which this unique articulation of science and activism, human rights genetics, has become subsumed in a global forensic genetics understood as creating the capacity for identifications, regardless of the cause of loss of life. The arguments for this most recent model are twofold: legal and technological. The ICMP was also once a regional identification effort dedicated to identifying the dead of Srebrenica (Wagner, 2008), run with the full collaboration of family members, very much on the model of the early teams in Latin America – with the exception that it had been mandated by the international community in response to the failure to protect Bosnians. By the time of the conference, ICMP, like the Argentine and Guatemalan teams, had found it increasingly difficult to sustain the organization and expertise in these single-country settings, mostly in the developing world. In the thirty years since the inception of the field, DNA has not only emerged as the gold standard for identification but it has also changed dramatically in technological form.

Argentina’s early adoption of genetic technologies occurred within larger geo-political transformations both in scientific practice and international law. The creation of the index of grandpaternity and the recognition that forensic science and genetics could be central tools in human rights organizing can be understood as a forensic first – a case of scientific innovation in the Global South heralding global shifts in legal and technological practice. However, Argentina cannot be understood outside of concomitant cultural and scientific shifts, which increasingly came to see DNA as something that was able to do work in the world (Rabinow, 1996). From law and medicine to social policy and education, during the last thirty years multiple domains of social life have come to be imagined as explicable and governable through the decoding and manipulation of genetic material. Just as DNA technology was co-produced with a legal system capable of drawing on its logics, the emergence of human rights genetics was part of the broader global socio-technical networks which stabilized forensic DNA as a powerful tool of justice.

In the 1980’s, when the original human rights forensic teams and organizations were established, genetics was a contested and challenging scientific practice. There were no routine forensic genetics laboratories and ‘DNA fingerprinting’ had not yet been invented. When genetics entered legal realms it was experimental at best and was put forward not by law enforcement or technicians but by academic scientists conducting research on the potential power of human genetics to individualize people. The first DNA technology widely used in forensic settings was histocompatibility testing or HLA tests for paternity. When paternity tests entered the legal arena in the United States in the mid 1970’s, the tests were only conditionally accepted as adjunctive evidence in family law (Jaffee, 1978; Kaye and Kanwischer, 1988; Terasaki, 1977). The tests reported paternity as a probability rather than an absolute fact, creating a problem for law, which was forced to move away from discrete facts to probabilistic thinking (Kaye, 1979). Legal scholars and legislators in the US expressed concern about the admissibility of the tests because of their potential to prejudice thinking on the issue of relatedness (Ellman and Kaye, 1979; Kaye, 1979). How were judges and juries to interpret probabilistic information in the case of a specific individual?

In what has become the origin story of forensic genetics, in 1985 Jeffreys published an article in Nature entitled ‘Individual-specific “fingerprints” of human DNA’. It presented a technique using highly variable segments of DNA ‘… to produce somatically stable DNA “fingerprints” which are completely specific to an individual (or to his identical twin) and can be applied directly to problems of human identification …’ (Jeffreys et al., 1985: 76). The majority of DNA analysis in the 1980’s involved RFLP (restriction fragment length polymorphism). It was a relatively low-tech method. Gel-electrophoresis and restriction enzymes, the necessary tools, were already available in molecular laboratories throughout the world. The technology itself remained relatively open and accessible to scientists because it did not require heavy technological investment in sequencing and analysis machines, as an Argentine physician working with the Grandmothers described to me. She was able to turn her routine laboratory equipment, an electrical charge, some agar and plates, into a site for human rights. Grandpaternity and genetic testing more broadly were understood during this period primarily as a problem of developing the right models and modes of calculation, rather than owning the right machines. Probability calculation and the modes of sampling and database construction that it necessitated undergirded the power and potential of genetics as a tool for family reunification.

Forensic genetics began its transformation from a difficult and debatable laboratory research practice into a discrete and reliable technology with the development of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and the ability to amplify DNA at specific Short Tandem Repeats (STR) sites. The FBI, in the United States, developed CODIS (the combined DNA Index System) as a DNA databank search tool and through it helped to standardize a set of thirteen STR loci as de-facto markers for human identification. With this large number of loci, debates about probability and the accuracy of DNA have all but disappeared from public discourse. The focus of critiques has been on laboratory process rather than the probative or truth-value of the test. However, as the accuracy and trust in DNA has increased as a result of this technological intensification, the cost of doing genetic analysis has risen dramatically.

STR analysis, using automated sequencers, standardized alleles and commercially packaged amplification and fluorescent labeling systems, all commercialized, has become the pre-requisite for participation in global regimes of genetic truth making. The system is expensive to purchase and use because of the startup costs paired with the continual need for proprietary kits and reagents. As I learned during my fieldwork in Guatemala and Argentina, these reagents cost 30–40% more there than they do in the US. In Guatemala there are no local company representatives or distributors requiring expensive import taxes and travel costs for maintenance. When a problem occurred with an analyzer or the laboratory needed new supplies, they often had to halt work for weeks while they negotiated with the company and the national government to bring the needed supplies into the country. Despite the hard work and the funding the FAFG obtained, the organization discovered that it was materially challenging to run a high-tech lab in a developing country, even with the best-trained personnel. And the South-South alliances built so many years ago by Snow when founding human rights forensics teams did not include biotechnology conglomerates.

I point to the technological changes that accompanied the move from human rights genetics to a centralized humanitarian genetics to suggest that the shifting networks described in this paper are not simply the result of political forces, such as geopolitical priorities and alliances. A fundamental concern for every human rights identification group I have studied has been whether to build its own laboratory or to send its samples to the US or Europe to be analyzed. Some have opted to invest in the infrastructure, as we saw in Guatemala; others, as in Peru, also part of the LIID, have chosen not to go that route, investing money instead in excavations, interviews, and collection of samples. These choices must be seen in light of the reality that forensic genetics is now a standardized complex, which has to be adopted in full for its successful mobilization as a truth machine (Lynch et al., 2008). A scientist with whom I worked in Argentina lamented the end of gel-electrophoresis, which could be run easily in a standard laboratory without the expense of automated analyzers. She believed that her gel-electrophoresis results were still scientifically valid, but knew they would not hold up to scrutiny in court because they were so outside of the norm of contemporary practice. Vibrant networks can fade away when they do not have the financial capital to mobilize the technological investment necessary to stabilize up-to-date kinds of truths.

Conclusion: Negotiating networks across uneven terrains of power

Very few Latin American teams attended ‘The Missing’. The director of the Guatemalan Foundation came, but he told me that he only went because he had separate business at the International Criminal Court. The Argentines, Peruvians, and Snow were absent, and it was noticed. I heard several meeting attendees question their absence: Why had they not come? Were they not invited? The multiple organizations I describe in this paper continue to coexist alongside large biotech companies and international organizations like Interpol and the Red Cross, which also increasingly do forensic genetics work. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo continue to use the National Genetic Databank to identify missing grandchildren, now well into their adulthoods, and the EAAF continues its work in Argentina and throughout the world, currently coordinating the identification of thousands of missing migrants in Mexico. But the shifts in the networks are nonetheless significant. The EAAF, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation all depend on foreign funds, mostly European and US government grants. With the brutality of Cold-War violence in Latin America fading and new spectacular violence related to migration, war and terrorism dominating news cycles, finding support for non-governmental forensics, especially NGOs with an explicit political commitment, has become increasingly difficult. At the same time, the cost of doing forensic identification is decreasing at large laboratories that can run samples in bulk, and shooting out of reach for small NGOs that seek to buy into the latest technological standards.

Human rights forensics, a movement that began as an indictment of the state for its forced disappearance of its citizens, its obfuscation of their lives, their deaths and even their burials, increasingly has become allied with state and military officials in order to fund its identification work. We see this shift in the moments I have described, as family members of the Disappeared become less and less central to the core practices of identification. Long-term engagement with affected communities has been replaced with standardized ante-mortem questioning forms that can be quickly filled out by any available volunteer, while a swab is used to take a reference sample for the laboratory. Rather than the holistic, investigatory approach espoused by Snow in the early years of human rights genetics, which took each disappeared person as a mystery to be painfully reconstructed through any source available, including testimonials and skeletal analysis for trauma, a DNA-led approach, pioneered by ICMP, has taken increasing precedence, where ante-mortem data and skeletal analysis, although important, are subordinated to high-throughput typing of skeletal samples and reference samples looking for a match. ⁹

Returning to the question with which I began – are we witnessing a rebirth of human rights forensic networks or its decline? – this ethnographic history of forensic genetics points to the importance of tropes of abandonment and to the perception by network members that their networks are being actively dismantled by institutions that seek to eliminate politics by refocusing post-conflict forensics on antiterrorism and individual crime. People who promote this shift toward the de-politicization of human rights forensics still herald Snow and the Argentine team as founders of the field. However, they marginalize human rights DNA-identification both materially and ideologically, as global security has become a chief rationale for DNA identification. The work continues, but as the director of the Guatemalan Foundation told me at the meeting at The Hague, 2014 would be their first year without any US funding at all. USAID suggested that he should encourage the Guatemalan government to take over the work of identification of the dead from the civil war. In the eyes of the West, it is a world where a return to the rule of law is taken as the norm for democratic transition, and therefore it makes little sense for foreign funders to pay for non-governmental scientists to do the basic work of the state. With the rise of a professional class of forensic scientists, the role of academic institutions also lessens, tearing apart the core alliances of early human rights networks. Old networks weren’t violently ruptured but are slowly pressured out of existence in favor of well-funded and centralized systems of identification, seemingly more relevant to the modern concerns of terrorism and mass disaster.

At the core of the debate between presenters and attendees at ‘The Missing’ at The Hague was a disagreement about the power of the international community in the face of state-sponsored violence and terrorism. How do academics, students, and families work to bring about change when governments and international organization have looked the other way? In Argentina, Guatemala, Peru and Bosnia, the international community did little to stop states’ wide-scale destruction of human life. This remained the case during the contemporary conflicts participants discussed in 2013 – such as the Assad regime’s bombing of Syrian civilians – making a mockery of the rallying cry of civil and political rights from the 1980s and 1990s: Nunca Más, Never Again. What value is the right to truth, guaranteed by forensic genetics, in a world where the right to safety and life remains of little importance, as is painfully clear in the 2016 Mediterranean migration crisis and the undocumented and unidentified dead of the US-Mexico border? It would seem that all the missing matter, yes, but some matter more than others. The human rights genetics established in the wake of cold-war violence in Latin America may have been a brief anomaly in the practices of human identification, one that displaced the state and put the family at the center, offering a different model for scientist-victim solidarity, and created a politically engaged scientific practice. Human rights genetics in the 1980s ruptured the existing forensic science networks to create a place from which to stand and advocate for a different model of science. Perhaps rather than question why human rights forensics has faded – the answers are obvious – we should marvel that it emerged at all.