The work of the EAAF in Mexico extended beyond the technical assistance that the group provided for the state of Chihuahua and the city of Ciudad Juárez. In fact, the participat io n of independent forensic teams in Mexico has long been promoted by internatio na l organisations, such as the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the IACHR. Support from international experts has been geared towards building national forensic capabilities, along with promoting and protecting human rights, including pressuring state security forces to end the use of torture.
International attention was drawn to human rights violations occurring in Mexico after a series of in situ visits made by Special Rapporteurs from the United Nations in the 1990s.
These visits were intended to gather information on events such as the repressive action taken by paramilitaries and the Army in Chiapas in the wake of the 1994 Zapatista uprising, the 1995 killings in Agua Blanca, and the enforced disappearance of hundreds
132 of political dissidents during the 1960s, with particular attention to the disappearance of Rosendo Radilla Pacheco in Guerrero in 1976.76
These events took place during the seventy-year ruling of one political party: the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional: PRI). From 1930 to 2000, the PRI won every presidential election held in Mexico. Unlike countries elsewhere in Latin America, where military governments took hold of power during the 1970s, Mexico was the ‘Perfect Dictatorship’, as the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa put in 1990. For Vargas Llosa:
The perfect dictatorship is not communism, not the Soviet Union, not Cuba, but Mexico, because it is a camouflaged dictatorship. It may not seem to be a dictatorship, but it has all the characteristics of dictatorship: the perpetuation, not of one person, but of an irremovable party, a party that allows sufficient space for criticism, provided such criticism serves to maintain the appearance of a democratic party, but which suppresses by all means, including the worst, whatever criticism may threaten its perpetuation in power (White, 2013, my emphasis).
This ‘perfect dictatorship’ allowed for human rights abuses to be perpetuated silently and systematically against Mexico’s most vulnerable populations (indigenous people, girls and women, as well as peasants), and against every person that openly opposed those in power. According to a report by the National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH, 2001), 532 political dissidents disappeared in Mexico in the 1970s. These persons were kidnapped by federal, state or municipal officials, and in most cases, were also tortured (CNDH, 2001). In 2000, however, an alternative party won the presidential elections for the first time in Mexican history. Vicente Fox Quezada became the first president from the opposition party, the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional: PAN), a
76 For instance, in 1968, state forces attacked an unknown number of protesting students in Tlatelolco Plaza, Mexico City. There is no official tally of the dead, but estimates range from 14 to 325. The massacre galvanized a growing conflict with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government and spurred the formation of leftist and guerilla groups. (Open Society, 2016, p. 22)
133 conservative party founded in Mexico in 1939. On December 2 2000, one day after Vicente Fox took office, he signed a Technical Cooperation Program with the United Nations that aimed to address five strategic areas of improvement for Mexico: National Human Rights initiatives, indigenous rights, administration of justice, economic, social and cultural rights, and vulnerable groups (EAAF, 2001, p. 78). As part of the new government strategy, the President also created the ‘Special Prosecutors Office for Social and Political Movements of the Past in Mexico’ (Fiscalía Especializada para Movimientos Sociales y Politicos del Pasado en Mexico: FEMOSPP), to assess the oppression faced by socio-political movements during the ruling of the PRI, with the aim of bringing the perpetrators of disappearances in the 1960s and 1970s to justice. Fox’s strategy to sign a cooperation agreement with United Nations for the respect of human rights and the establishment of FEMOSPP, is a key moment for the development of forensic expertise in the country. From this moment up until today, the Mexican government will start receiving international technical support to build forensic capacities. This situation is similar to other democratic transitions in Latin America that aimed to investigate the crimes of the past. However, Fox’s FEMOSPP will only operate until 2007, without fulfilling the promises of its creation: to bring the perpetrators of human rights violations to justice.
In 2001 the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights requested that the EAAF join an advisory mission to the Mexican government. Under the framework of the Technical Cooperation program, the EAAF “write a protocol for investigating deaths suspected of having been caused by Human Rights Abuses” (EAAF, 2001, p. 78). The development of this protocol under the leadership of Dr. Maria Cristina de Mendonca, a Portuguese legal-medical expert, detailed a practical guide for carrying out investigat io ns that included the analysis and collection of human remains. These programs were “meant to begin preparing those with medical and anthropological backgrounds to act not only as
134 expert witnesses, but also as trainers who could then disseminate these techniques in different parts of the country” (EAAF, 2001, p. 79). The dissemination of these forensic techniques were meant to enable forensic scientists to highlight the human rights abuses committed by federal and municipal forces during the 1960s, as well as to equip medical examiners with the necessary expertise to document these atrocities. As explained in Chapter Two (on Forensis and STS), the development of forensic expertise in Latin America was in response to enforced disappearances and human rights violat io ns committed by military governments, particularly especially during the 1970s and 1980s when ‘Operation Condor’, a U.S. supported strategy to combat communism, was promoted throughout South America. In the case of Mexico’s ‘perfect dictatorship’, which stayed in power for 70 years, there were disappearances and extra-judicial killings that required investigation.
The IACHR, has had an important role in the prosecution of human rights abuses committed by states. The IACHR, created in 1959, is a principal and autonomous organ of the Organization of American States (OAS), and its mission is to “promote and protect human rights in the American hemisphere ”.77 In 1979, the I/A Court H.R. was installed for the protection of human rights in the region. Since its creation, the Court has offered provision for petitions from individuals to be filed against governments, for instance: the petition submitted to the I/A Court H.R. via the IACHR against the Mexican governme nt for their inability to adequately investigate the femicide of three of the victims from the Cotton Field Case. Following the precedent set up by this petition case, in 2008, in a joint effort between the Association of Relatives of Disappeared, Detainees and Victims of Human Rights Violations in Mexico (Asociación de Familiares de Detenidos, Desaparecidos y Victimas de Violaciones a los Derechos Humanos en Mexico:
77 Information taken from: http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/mandate/what.asp, Accessed: September 2016.
135 AFADEM) and the Mexican Commission for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights (Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promocion de los Derechos Humanos : CMDPDH), a demand was filed to the I/A Court H.R. against the Mexican State for the disappearance of Rosendo Radilla Pacheco.
On 25 August 1974, Rosendo Radilla Pacheco was detained and disappeared by members of the army. He was travelling with his eleven-year old son in a bus from Atoyac de Alvarez towards Chilpancingo, Guerrero, in the southern state of Mexico. The army had installed checkpoints along the highways searching for activists working against the one-party regime. Since the 1960s, over 400 individuals from Atoyac were disappeared by security forces when “the government began a counterinsurgency campaign in Guerrero against the Party of the Poor (Partido de los Pobres), a guerrilla group started by a local school teacher, Lucio Cabañas” (EAAF 2007-2009, p. 151). Mr. Rosendo Radilla was a social leader and former municipal president of Atoyac de Alvarez in 1956, as well as a teacher and father of twelve. He used to compose and sing Mexican folk songs, corridos that expressed the struggle of social leaders in Guerrero, such as Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vazquez (Dutrénit and Jaloma, 2014).
As witnessed by his son, Mr. Rosendo Radilla was detained because the government knew that he composed corridos (IACHR, 2009, Paragraph 125):
My father said: ‘What I am charged with?’
- ‘You write corridos’
- ‘Is that a crime?’
- ‘No, but for the time being ya te chingaste [you are fucked up] In the meantime, ya te chingaste.’78
78 Narrative description of events according to Dutrénit and Jaloma (2014, p. 182 footnote 4, my translation).
136 In 2009, a year after the case was accepted at the I/A Court H.R., a court ruling obliged the Mexican government to locate Mr. Rosendo Radilla, dead or alive. During the same year, following a request made by the CMDPDH and the AFADEM, members of the EAAF provided training to state officials in ante-mortem and burial site data collectio n and procedures for conducting witness interviews (EAAF 2007-2009, p. 153).
Additionally, the EAAF provided an introduction to forensic sciences to AFADEM members to furnish them with a better understanding of the procedures of forensic anthropology and of their personal role and rights relating to forensic investiga t io n processes (EAAF 2007-2009, 153).
Following the IACHR sentence, forensic investigations and exhumations were carried out in and around the Atoyac Military Base. As directed by the General Attorney Office at the time, this project was carried out through collaboration between national and independent peritos (experts). The forensic work carried out at Atoyac’s Military Base was supported by the notion that the participation of independent experts gave credibilit y to proceedings, and promoted the rights of the victims’ families, particularly in ensuring accountability for the forensic work carried out on site. In 2011 the anthropologist Arturo Talavera was appointed the principal forensic expert for the Radilla case. In an interview carried out by the historians Silvia Dutrénit and Elena Jaloma (2014), Talavera discussed how his scientific participation in this case was separated from any political interests.
[…] When we were solicited to collaborate (coadyuvar) with the General Attorney’s Office [PGR], we were very clear: we are academics, I mean, we don’t have any political flag, or support anyone or dismiss anyone, and we were not going to accept being put under pressure [sometidos], we were only going to give an academic and scientific opinion, with an academic method. […] One does not want to be popular or liked by everyone, it’s all about being truthful to science,
137 to the academic aspect. (Taken from Dutrénit and Jaloma, 2014, my
translation)79
The IACHR recommended that Mr. Rosendo Radilla’s family members, along with independent experts (or peritos), must be present during any exhumation process. Silvia Diaz, physical anthropologist from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and part of the expert team of the Special Prosecutors Office for the Investiga t io n of Federal Crimes (Subprocuraduría Especializada en Investigación de Delitos Federales), from the Attorney General’s Office, and who took part in the exhumat io n processes, described how:
It’s difficult to do your job; there are lots of people around you, all the mass media, there are relatives [of the victims], police officers, a lot of people who are watching every movement you do, so, sometimes it is not easy to deal with […] The job [we do] in these contexts involves feelings, involves emotions, and when you do scientific work, the last thing you have to do is to involve these issues. (Taken from Dutrénit and Jaloma, 2014, my translation)
Forensic experts participating in the exhumations and identifications of victims have long argued that their expert work is separated from both politics and emotion, in the name of remaining bound to science and scientific knowledge. As Stover and Ryan argue (2001, p. 7), it is the role of national and international forensic experts to “listen and interpret the evidence”. In fact, it was forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow who coined the term
‘osteobiography’, meaning the capacity to understand someone’s individual biography through ‘listening’ to what a bone has to say: Bones never lie, and forensic anthropologists have the expertise to carefully listen to them speak.
79 Arturo Talavera is a researcher from the National Institute of Anthropology and History, INAH, principal forensic expert for the Rosendo Radilla case since 2011 (Dutrénit and Jaloma, 2014).
138 However, STS and feminist scholars have long argued that scientific knowledge is always socially constructed and is, therefore, political (Cole, 2003; Lynch et al., 2008; Lynch and Jasanoff, 1998; M’charek 2000, 2013; Latour, 1983). The ‘politics’ that forensic experts constantly seek to distance themselves from are always already embedded in their scientific practices. According to conventional scientific arguments, truth and certainty can only be obtained through the lenses of an ‘objective’ technology that establishes a clear distinction between ‘knowledge’ and ‘body/emotions’. It the case of human rights investigations, such as those explored in this chapter, forensic anthropology and DNA analysis are the technologies that scientists use to listen to what the dead softly speak.
This is, however, not to say that forensic science offers a space where power relations, knowledge and positionality do not exist, but, rather, the practitioners of the discipline unwittingly make powerful statements on social and political life (as has been shown by:
M'charek 2008, 2013; Moon 2012; Prainsack, 2011; 2009)
As for the status of forensic science in the country, Mercedes Doretti explained that
´Mexico was the first country that [the EAAF] visited, where relatives of the victims did not believe in Forensic and DNA practices at all´ (Interview with Doretti, 2013, my emphasis). For the citizens who were in contact with the provision of forensic services in the country, it was clear that their main problem did not reside with the forensic technologies understood in the abstract, but in the techno-social spaces where forensic knowledge was produced. Given this scepticism, all of the international cooperation agreements that provided technical assistance and training to the Mexican state were doomed to fail in this regard.
In 2006, Felipe Calderon (then President of Mexico) deployed military forces in certain states of the country to combat drug cartels and reduce corruption among local police forces. However, his security strategy provoked violence to spread all over the country (Tuckman, 2013). Cases of disappearances were not only reported in Chihuahua, but in
139 other states such as Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and Guerrero. These increases in violence were explained by authorities as the result of clashes between drug cartels and state forces.
The gendered discourse that was applied to the young women of Ciudad Juárez was reappropriated to characterise these teenage boys and young men as being part of drug cartels, and their associations with the ‘wrong people’ were deemed to be the cause of their disappearances and violent deaths.
The so called ‘War on Drugs’ and the violence it has generated all over the country have dramatically increased the number of homicides and disappearances in Mexico. As stated by the National Commission on Human Rights, between 2007 and September 2016, eight hundred and fifty- five clandestine burials have been discovered throughout Mexican territory, and more than 1,548 thousands bodies have been recovered from these sites.80 From December 2006 through to the end of 2015, over 150,000 people were intentiona l ly killed in Mexico, while the number of disappearances remains unknown (Open Society, 2016). According to the evidence gathered for the report ‘Undeniable Atrocities’ by the Open Society Justice Initiative, the increase of violence and disappearances in the country was driven by violence relating to organised crime and the state’s security strategy, which relied on an extrajudicial and indiscriminate use of force (Open Society, 2016, p. 12).
Although data on the number of disappearances is either unreliable or non-existe nt, federal authorities maintain that the number of ‘missing’ or ‘not located’ persons in the country stands at approximately 30,000. Reportedly, 15,000 bodies remain unidentif ied in mortuaries all over the country due to the lack of coordination and effic ie nt communication between forensic institutions.
80 Information collected from the National Commission on Human Rights Report on Disappearances and Clandestine Mass Graves, Available at:
http://www.cndh.org.mx/sites/all/doc/Informes/Especiales/Informe Especial_20170406_ Resumen.pdf (Accessed April 2017). For more information on clandestine burials in Mexico visit:
http://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/graficos/graficosanimados14/ EU_Fosas_Clandestinas/ (Accessed October 2016)
140 There are poor clearance rates for almost all crimes in Mexico, including serious offences such as murder. In 2010 the national impunity rate for homicides was 80.6%, with the worst rate of 96.4% in Chihuahua. That is, for every ten homicides in Mexico, eight are unpunished (Mexico Evalúa, 2012). These poor statistics mean that civilians question not only the capacity of authorities to deal with insecurity and the sheer amount of bodie s being discovered in clandestine mass graves, but also question whether there might be collusion between governmental authorities and organised crime.
As Julia, who has been looking for her son over five years, explains:
Here [in Mexico] what is happening, [differently to other countries] is that the state is against the citizens, the drug cartels are against the citizens, I mean, we [civil society] have two different battle fronts that need to be tackled. That is how I see it, otherwise there wouldn’t be any reason as to why I am here [doing the search for her son and demanding justice]. (Interview with Julia outside the Ministry of Interior Offices in Mexico City where she was engaged in a hunger strike protest, July 2013).
What Julia has experienced seems to show the rule rather than the exception of the experiences of the relatives of disappeared persons in their dealings with governme nta l authorities. Organised crime has challenged the authority of the state, not by threatening to capture it, but by damaging and weakening it through corruption (International Crisis Group 2013, p. i). In recent years, drug cartels in Mexico have been diversifying their organised crime groups and activities. Now, they not only traffic drugs but also people (particularly women and children), they participate in mass kidnappings, steal oil from the state industry, and train gunmen that will later be used to confront other cartels and state forces (Tuckman, 2013). Drug Cartels and organised crime de facto control over certain territories, and their use of military grade weapons has questioned the state’s monopoly on the use of force; to the extent that, in some strategic zones and highwa ys,
141 the organised crime have installed checkpoints protected by gunmen in order to control and secure the transportation of illegal items (International Crisis Group, 2013).
The forensic science services in the country are overwhelmed by the high number of criminal investigations and violence produced by the ‘War on Drugs’. The provision of forensic science services in Mexico is carried out independently by the local Forensic Medical Services (SEMEFO). In Mexico City this service is provided by the National Institute of Forensic Sciences (INCIFO).81 Of the thirty-two states of Mexico, only twenty have a local SEMEFO, which means that when forensic services are needed, local authorities must send all the evidence to the closest available SEMEFO, or to their headquarters in Mexico City (Garcia, 2013). Most local SEMEFOs have morgue facilit i es with holding capacities of 10-20 bodies. However, high levels of violence mean that, for example, when clandestine mass graves are discovered, sometimes containing hundreds of bodies, there are not enough trained staff to deal with the sheer number of corpses, nor is there sufficient space to house bodies in order to carry out identification and
The forensic science services in the country are overwhelmed by the high number of criminal investigations and violence produced by the ‘War on Drugs’. The provision of forensic science services in Mexico is carried out independently by the local Forensic Medical Services (SEMEFO). In Mexico City this service is provided by the National Institute of Forensic Sciences (INCIFO).81 Of the thirty-two states of Mexico, only twenty have a local SEMEFO, which means that when forensic services are needed, local authorities must send all the evidence to the closest available SEMEFO, or to their headquarters in Mexico City (Garcia, 2013). Most local SEMEFOs have morgue facilit i es with holding capacities of 10-20 bodies. However, high levels of violence mean that, for example, when clandestine mass graves are discovered, sometimes containing hundreds of bodies, there are not enough trained staff to deal with the sheer number of corpses, nor is there sufficient space to house bodies in order to carry out identification and