Artículos Destacados

Septiembre 1, 2007

Unearthing the Truth: an Interview with Mercedes Doretti, co-founder of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF)

"Recovering the remains is not enough to erase the pain of the past, but it is a huge part of healing and crucial form of reparations."-Mimi Doretti

By Veerle Opgenhaffen 

When faced with the question of resolving disappearances, we often think of police investigations, legal inquiries, and truth-seeking measures as the primary methods to determine the fates of victims. Yet the truth can also quite literally be unearthed by analyzing the bones, remains, and other physical forms of evidence left behind. Even when destroyed beyond recognition, incinerated, or buried in mass graves, these remains hold vital clues, not only to the identity of the person killed, but also to the often systemic nature of the crimes that led to their disappearance and death.

The art of riddling truths from fragments of remains constitutes a highly specialized field known as forensic science, considered an "applied" science because it borrows methods and techniques from multiple scientific disciplines and applies them to forensic (legal) cases. Specifically, it combines subfields of both anthropology and archeology, employing tools from genetics, ballistics, radiology, osteology, and other means to assess the identity, age, sex, stature, ancestry, cause of death, trauma, and other characteristics of the deceased.

Since its inception in 1984, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) has become one of the foremost organizations in the world to apply the forensic sciences to investigating past human rights violations. The team has worked in more than 30 countries-including almost every known location where genocide or mass murder has taken place during the 20th and 21st centuries-and helped train and form similar research teams in many other countries.

The EAAF's work has bolstered the investigations and findings of countless international human rights bodies, including truth commissions and tribunals. Like the ICTJ, its work responds to specific requests from local and international NGO's and victims groups-as well as occasionally government bodies-but is premised, first and foremost, on serving and defending victims and their rights. In pursuit of the truth, they do more than excavate bones and work at gravesites. Often, they perform exhaustive research and interviews, looking deeply into national archives and police records; acquire testimonies from victim's families; and attempt to develop a comprehensive picture of what happened.

In recent years, the EAAF has often worked in places where the Center is active and has at times closely collaborated with us to share information and expertise in the service of truth-seeking and other human rights-related investigations. For example, it recently worked with Morocco's truth commission (IER), the truth commission in East Timor (the CAVR), and even recently returned to South Africa to work on unresolved cases of violent murders committed during the Apartheid era.

I recently had the privilege of speaking with co-founder of the EAAF, Mercedes "Mimi" Doretti by phone at her New York office.

VO: You've worked all over the world on the issue of disappearances. What does this international commemoration of the disappeared mean to you and have you noticed any overarching global patterns with this phenomenon in your work?

MD: Everywhere we work we have seen the incredible pain and paralysis that a disappearance produces for a family. This is pretty much a uniform response throughout the world. Given the depth of that pain and grief, it is all the more important for a new government to address the past if possible and for the international community to assist with that as much as it can. Recovering the remains is not enough to erase the pain of the past but it is a huge part of healing and a crucial form of reparations. Families need it. In fact, we think that too often the recovery and identification of remains is not viewed enough as an integral part of the reparations process. We feel that this should always be a strong part of a TRC's final report recommendations because it can take decades to recover this information and both governments and other bodies need to commit to making that happen for as long as doubts and questions remain. The kind of information granted by forensic evidence is a vital form of reparations and can contribute to accountability in profound ways, so it should not be held as less important than economic forms of reparations.

Also, from a scientific perspective, we should be using forensic methods and resources wisely and carefully, which brings me to the whole notion of having a well-planned, comprehensive, and holistic approach. People should not rush their investigations, nor skip steps on timing and methodology, precisely because it can be so deeply painful for families when this process goes wrong. We owe it to them to be as thorough and diligent as possible.

VO: How do you choose where to get involved? Is it usually linked to other TJ mechanisms being functional in that particular context?

MD: We work exclusively on the basis of requests for our work. By now we have become well-known around the world and people are generally aware of how we might be able to help them, so there's very little need for us to go out and offer our services.

VO: How do you manage the expectations of victims' families? Are your findings revealed discreetly to them first or simultaneously provided to the public and/or government? Have victims ever been harmed or threatened by being involved your investigations and, if so, how do you protect them from dangers?

MD: Families of the disappeared are our absolute priority and it is easy to see why they get frustrated by the whole process of trying to determine the fate of their loved ones. For example, in Juarez, Mexico, the remains of some of the 400 women found there have been tested by many different sources and at many different times and all of those results are now on the victims' judicial files, which can create tremendous contradictions and complications for further criminal investigations and trials. The lack of a well-organized, multi-disciplinary approach has aggravated rather than helped the victims' families to find answers. For this reason, our method is to always meet with victims' families before we start an investigation and we do not start any of our work if the families refuse our intervention. Expert witnesses in other contexts are obligated to intervene regardless, but as an organization we don't have that obligation. So we meet with families, hear their stories, ask about the details of the case, what was done, what their worries are, if they have any questions, and we also try to be very honest with them about what is or isn't possible in the current context, in other words, we give them as much information as we can about the possible outcomes. Then, we always provide the results of our investigations to the victims' families either before or simultaneous to our handing the results over to a judge or commission.

As for safety, it really depends on how much power those suspected of committing the crimes still maintain. This can be really difficult in contexts where there are ongoing crimes. In places where the crimes have largely tapered off but people still wield some power, we have seen a lot of harassment and intimidation and especially pressure on people to keep the problem ‘local' and avoid going to international organizations.

VO: I wonder if you face obstacles with dependence on some degree of cooperation from governments. In other words, is it possible to work where there is little cooperation from the state and/or a nonfunctioning legal system? Can and do you work in places still plagued by ongoing oppression and violence?

MD: Yes, access is a major obstacle for us and in fact, sometimes 50% of a given job is taken up trying to arrange our access to remains and files. We try to work in a very comprehensive manner no matter where we get involved, so we review all the available information on a case before accepting a job. To prepare, we rely on reports such as those put out by the ICTJ and other groups. We occasionally get involved in contexts of ongoing violence and are not uniformly dependent on a vibrant national or local judiciary, as we often feed the results of our inquiries to other kinds of bodies, such as truth commissions. That being said, working in a climate of ongoing conflict is very difficult and ultimately depends on a balance of forces, especially on civil society's power to mobilize enough international support to allow us to do our work effectively. Of course each context is different...

Also, in many cases there is a tendency to put all of the effort into genetic evidence, such as either nuclear or mitochondrial DNA testing. The problem with this approach is that it cannot capture the full picture and can be riddled with problems that often result in misidentifications. No matter where we get involved, we try to advance a holistic and long-term vision of how to proceed toward uncovering the truth, and this includes teaching methods and providing other tools that help identify remains and tell the story of the missing.

VO: I've read about contexts where some of the exhumation work was either done improperly or prematurely by national teams, sometimes with negative consequences. Can you talk about the importance of timing and training and some of the ways in which well-meaning groups can botch future investigations?

MD: There is often tremendous momentum when a transition happens which can contribute to a wave of popular sentiment that sends well-meaning people to rush to the gravesites, exhume as much as possible, and start mass DNA testing. This rushed approach can be disastrous because we believe you really need to do a full-fledged preliminary investigation, that must be multi-disciplinary-in other words incorporate anthropology, genetic testing etc-as well as examine all the archives, interview victims' families, and get all available information on the status of the missing persons. The problem is that each side is prone to making mistakes and so the more holistic an investigation can be, the more statistically accurate our results can be.

VO: I am intrigued by your ongoing work in places that have experienced transitions, such as South Africa, Mexico, and Morocco. To what extent does demand for this kind of work tend to be continuous and how do you respond to the long-term demands for your expertise?

MD: One of our core principles is to have a long-term effect on criminal procedures and forensic capacity in every country we work in. Even in places where we have a longer presence, we can never stay as long as the people need us to because in reality this work can go on for decades. What we do in response to that need is we train as many people as possible and also educate them about new methods and international protocols at the same time. Our success in that regard really depends on how strong the medical and anthropological community is in a given location and also what kinds of risks we could be putting them in, since we have the luxury of leaving and they are stuck with sometimes hostile and dangerous groups who do not want to see the work continue. We are extremely committed to staying in touch with all the people we've worked with and to keeping an eye on how things are developing.