Critical contacts: making STS public amid Mexico’s forensic crisis

This Editorial is based on the Hebe Vessuri Lecture delivered by Vivette García Deister on December 7, 2022, at the 4S/ESOCITE joint conference in Cholula, Puebla.

In early 2022, I had the honor and pleasure of coordinating a book published with the Mexican branch of Siglo XXI Editores. The book is titled ADN, Protagonista Inesperado. Promesas Y Realidades De La Investigación Genética Ante Nuestra Crisis Forense [DNA, unexpected protagonist. Promises and realities of genetic research amid Mexico’s forensic crisis] (García-Deister 2022a). It is composed of seven chapters written by researchers working in the social sciences and humanities, and it is organized around a theme of national importance: the unfolding of Mexico’s violence emergency and the central role that DNA technologies have taken in the resulting forensic crisis. I’d like to take this opportunity to use my own experience writing this book, and my journey researching the social and political life of forensic DNA in Mexico, to consider the process and possibilities for making STS public. I take this book to be a form of public STS scholarship because the results of our research have been made accessible to a wide array of professionals (not only those familiarized with science and technology studies). We hope for the book to have public uses and public consequences. Indeed, a core message of the book is that as a society, we will benefit from shifting our attention away from genetic databases and towards more relational and dynamic infrastructures that cannot be reduced to a certain set of technologies. Whether or not we achieve this shift in focus is up to our readers and our relationship with them. But there is also something else about this book and its relationship to public STS. As I was reviewing the manuscript in January 2022, I was struck by the fact that all the chapters, except one, frequently cited journalistic references along with academic papers, official documents, and textual quotations of interviewees and research participants. And, although the number of journalists cited was fairly high – 30 – it was still not as high as the number of journalists that have been murdered in Mexico under the current administration: 37.¹ Journalists are being targeted and killed for their investigative labor, but their work has been necessary for scholars as well as for the public in general to critically narrate DNA’s role in Mexico’s current forensic crisis. Consider the following progression of press articles related to forensic DNA.

A note published on September 28, 2007, in El Universal makes the first (and only one of that year) mention of forensic DNA in a national newspaper (Rivera Millán 2007). In the article, the correspondent explains that two bodies were exhumed in a coastal community in Michoacán, which could belong to two relatives of the candidate for state government, and who were “lifted” from a bar a year earlier. The remains were sent to the Morelia Attorney General’s Office, writes journalist Rafael Rivera Millán, “to carry out exhaustive studies, including DNA, to determine for certain” if they correspond to the candidate’s relatives. Three years after this article was published, mentions of forensic DNA in national newspapers were already in double digits, and by 2018, the sum of mentions in the five newspapers analyzed was more than a hundred.

We find changes in the way that DNA was reported between 2007 and 2018. If in 2007 there was expectation about the ability of forensic genetics to identify bodies, by 2010, seven years before she was murdered, journalist Miroslava Breach and her colleague Rubén Villalpando reported a few cases of successful identification with the help of DNA (Breach and Villalpando 2010). By 2012 another journalist, Daniela Rea, was already reporting “deficiencies in the taking of samples and the lack of a national database” (Rea 2012). At the same time that the demands of civil society for the creation of DNA banks became news, we were also informed that only a very low percentage of the bodies found in clandestine graves were identified by the authorities.

Forensic genetics has taken a prominent role in Mexico, and this role is specific. While publics in the global north increasingly employ DNA technologies to recreationally explore their genealogies or the genetic aspects of their propensity to disease, Mexican publics more often engage DNA through the lens of forensic science (García-Deister and López-Beltrán 2017). DNA and the notion of genetic evidence have become ingrained in the vocabulary of Mexicans. They have become keywords in the speeches of officials and the claims of civil society, to the extent that political promises and citizen demands tend to converge on DNA –both those who are missing and those who are searching.

DNA technologies have had, historically, multiple uses and effects in Latin America. Mothers and grandmothers organized around genetic technologies in the wake of the horrific atrocities of the 1976–1983 dictatorship in Argentina. They found in these “subversive” technologies a path towards recovering their kidnapped grandchildren and identifying the bodies of the 30,000 disappeared. In this way, as my colleague Lindsay Smith (2016) has argued, DNA technologies became powerful human rights tools that reconfigured social, familiar, and political life. But the Mexican context is quite different. The number of disappeared persons (as a reminder: almost 110,000 since the 1960s) is one of the largest in the history of Latin America, and it happens in the absence of a military dictatorship. Also, because there is no dictatorship, and disappearance is not timebound to a specific administration, the search for the missing cannot be anchored in a transitional justice framework of the likes of post-dictatorship Argentina or Guatemala, or even the Peace Accords of Colombia.

In the case of Argentina, DNA technologies helped to counter the effects of a military dictatorship and restore democracy. In Mexico, appeals to DNA technologies as a solution to a human rights crisis have had thus far the opposite effect of sustaining the status quo. Authorities promise (but fail to deliver) genetic databases above any other forensic resource, and civil society continues to demand them. In the edited volume, I argue that, despite the efforts to use DNA technologies as a solution to the crisis, forensic DNA databases have functioned mostly as necropolitical devices for the administration of hope and death (García-Deister 2022b).

In this context, academic engagement with searching families has been intense and has taken different forms over the past ten years. Forensic research has become such a common theme that a recurring comment among groups of civilian search collectives, called buscadoras, is that each collective has no budget, but it does have its own “in-house” ethnographer, journalist, and filmmaker. This engagement has been established responsibly in some cases –as a form of research activism that advances the victims’ goals – and irresponsibly in others –promising technical solutions that cannot be achieved and co-opting the legitimacy of the families.

Indeed, the Mexican forensic crisis has changed relationships between disciplines, approximations, and fields. It has had a lasting impact on social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, sociology, science and technology studies, and a score of other fields and disciplines that have approached forensic practices as an object of study. Several award-winning journalists and film makers have delved into the crisis (Huffshmid and Hennies, Ferri, Rea, Franco, Corral Paredes, to name only a few).

Direct engagement with searching families has been one form of public STS, but there is another form of engagement that needs our attention. It is the question of the relationship between STS and journalism. And more specifically, how STS can become public through its entanglement with journalism. STS has always concerned itself with being engaged, participatory, and public. These terms have been used to describe the field since its inception, and they have also taken context-specific meanings. There is a long-standing concern in Anglophone STS that the field can and should seek to make a difference in the world. In the 1990s, sociologist Steve Fuller divided STS into a discipline-centric High Church and an activist-oriented Low Church (Fuller 1993). Steve Breyman and colleagues reacted by stating that social movements play a central role in phenomena of interest to STS and are not merely one facet of a diverse field (Breyman 2017). Many have proposed classifications of STS research by topic, degree of public engagement, and contribution to public policy, just as taxonomies of sociology arranged by type of knowledge produced (reflexive or instrumental) and audience reached (academic or extra-academic) have been at the heart of sociological discussions of public scholarship (Bell 1996, 2012; Burawoy 2005; Hartmann 2017; Lareau and Muñoz 2017; Nichols 2017; Wingfield 2017). The term “field philosophy” was also recently proposed as a way of describing collaborative research geared towards real-world problem-solving (Brister and Frodman 2020).

The discussion continues in STS and in many of the disciplines that STS draws from. But this discussion also exceeds its disciplinary vessels. Indeed, scholars’ ability to develop ways of intervening in their field sites as citizen-researchers and to make their competence applicable to public policy or everyday life has been widely considered a mark of good STS scholarship.

In Latin America, science, technology, and society studies (CTS is the preferred initialism) have approached innovation, technological development, scientific change, and technology management from socio-historical, political, and economic visions. Twentieth-century scholarship in the region was concerned with three core problems, as described by veteran scholar Hebe Vessuri. One, the question of the region’s technological dependence on the more advanced industrial countries. Two, the relationship between the economics of development and the science of innovation. And three, the nature of science and technology, and their role in a peripheral context like Latin America (Vessuri 1987, 2007; Kreimer and Vessuri 2018).

Regarding the first question of technological dependence on the global north, Vessuri has resisted throughout her multi-sited career the easy narrative that the objects of scientific research in Latin America are imposed by multinational financing entities who set the agendas for those striving to enter the “developed” world (Vessuri 2011). There is an element of subversion in the breaking of North-South subordination and in troubling the usual hierarchies between donor and recipient countries as STS analytics. This outlook gained traction both as an object of historical reflection and as political positioning for doing STS or CTS from and about Latin America (Arellano 2007; Dagnino, Thomas, and Gomes 1998; Jiménez 2010; Thomas 2010). In addition to being a productive avenue for theorization, recognizing that science and technology research is attuned to situated challenges, as Vessuri and others have insisted, oriented the approach to the other two core problems throughout the twentieth century. The result has been a field eager to ascertain the scientific standing of the social sciences, and determined to impact the very structure of the nascent scientific policies.

Historically, then, the commitment to making STS more public in Latin America has focused on the design of public policies, to the extent that this has been considered a form of mainstream CTS in the region (Velho 2011; Casas and Mercado 2016). My short-lived experience with public policy happened in 2017. I was consulted several times by the now-extinct Office of Scientific and Technological Information for the Congress of the Union on matters related to biobanks (Manrique de Lara 2018) and genetic databases (Dolores). In my consultations, I emphasized the need to acknowledge the different challenges associated with the biomedical, forensic, and recreational use of biological samples and genetic data, but the laws that have since been created or modified tend to conflate these uses and categories. My disappointment with public policy as a form of engagement has been reinforced by the current administration’s disregard for expert knowledge and its dismantling of consultative bodies along with democratic institutions. Incidence in public policy is not, in the current political climate, the most viable path for making STS public (see Reyes-Galindo 2022).

How, then, can STS engage more broadly? I’ve mentioned the public policy route. There is also the path of writing op-eds. Like other scholars interested in reaching wider audiences, I have published opinion pieces in non-academic forums, and I’ve understood that some of the best results of scholarship going public follow a model that relies on making academics write more like journalists rather than on journalists spinning academics’ stories. My own experience with the amazing editors at SLATE Future Tense, and my appreciation of spaces such as The Conversation, that brands itself as “academic rigour, journalistic flair,” have made me aware of the many possibilities of writing a focused opinion for a targeted audience. But these experiences have also made me mindful that STS scholars do not become journalists, and, especially in times of crisis, we cannot do without journalists.

Like science, journalism is a fundamental activity of any democratic society. Like good investigative journalism, good ethnographic studies of science demand a keen sense of observation from the researcher, but perhaps the most important demand is that the researcher remains. Acclaimed journalist Tom Wolfe wrote “The New Journalism” in 1973, proposing that in the new way of doing journalism (one that was becoming more narrative and less rigid, with representatives such as Joan Didion and Truman Capote) reporting would entail that “the fundamental unit of work is no longer the piece of information, but the scene (…). Consequently, your main problem as a reporter is simply to stay long enough for the scenes to take place before your eyes” (Wolfe 1973, cited in Guerriero 2018, 34). Among the many challenges facing those of us who ethnographically study the forensic crisis is, first, access to the field, and then the ability to remain long enough in it – long enough for the relevant categories to emerge. Remain long enough to have something to say. This is the one piece of advice that self-taught Argentinian journalist Leila Guerriero has for aspiring journalists: Tengan algo para decir [Have something to say] (Guerriero 2018, 15). To this we might add writer Vivian Abenshushan’s instruction to aspiring authors that they procure themselves a style (Abenshushan 2007).

Remain. Have something to say. Procure yourself a style. This triad of advice for good journalism is the same advice we might give to ethnographers. A resource for taking up sociologist David Hess’ invitation to STS scholars “to provide [a] much needed leadership as articulators of the public interest” (Hess 2017, 242).

In taking advice from journalists and writers unmoored from academia, I am not claiming that this is a brave new era for STS – one where, in mimicking narrative journalism, it can finally become public or socially relevant. STS scholars and journalists do not do equivalent work. Journalists and academics “remain” differently. We have different time frames and productivity traps: the 24-hour cycle and the hard deadline; the line of research and five-year review. We have different vulnerabilities. The same journalists who investigate death and disappearance in Mexico are themselves being killed (Corcoran 2022), whereas we academics struggle to keep the funding going, the research projects alive, and the topics relevant. While there are important differences to our work and disciplinary or inter-disciplinary identities, there is room for a generative entanglement between STS and journalism – and not only science journalism (as Hebe Vessuri pointed out during her remarks on my lecture).

The analysis of DNA in Mexico’s forensic crisis is a good example of this entanglement because of DNA’s enduring role as the purported technoscientific solution to the crisis. Called upon by citizens and government officials alike to produce truth and identify thousands of bodies, DNA has become a protagonist of social and political life in Mexico. This role has persisted throughout three presidential terms, many 24-hour news cycles, and 10 years of my career. The effects of this central role have been critically assessed by STS and documented by journalists.

Wendy Pérez coauthored with Paula Mónaco a piece of investigative journalism that was recently awarded the National Journalism Prize.² The report was published in 14 different media sites in February of last year, and it involved Mexico’s former national search commissioner (in a country with more than 100,000 disappeared persons, there is a governmental agency dedicated to searching for these people and registering new cases). Towards the end of his tenure, in 2018, the commissioner illegally gave thousands of genetic profiles to a private laboratory. Wendy Pérez and her coauthor also documented that this private laboratory was making agreements with public institutions to carry out identification processes and was using the leaked data to approach the families of victims to capitalize on their hope of identification, which in almost all cases turned out to be false. Because of this report, the former search commissioner went to trial and was sentenced to three years in prison for DNA trafficking; a sentence that was quickly translated into a symbolic monetary exchange for probation and a small fine. In addition to writing this report, and another one about the work of female forensic experts in Mexico, for which she and Paula Mónaco won the Breach/Valdez Award for Journalism and Human Rights (Pérez and Mónaco Felipe 2020), Wendy also wrote the prologue to my edited volume on forensic DNA. In her prologue, Wendy narrates how her investigative trajectory on forensic DNA coincided with mine:

As my coauthor Paula Mónaco and I were getting ready to publish our report “DNA Traffickers” and we were fact-checking our information, I came across some notes and an op-ed titled “Political uses of a national DNA database” that was written in 2016 by a researcher at UNAM [she is referring to me]. (Pérez 2022)

Wendy was intrigued that a set of questions that I had posed in my 2016 piece for Animal Político were as relevant in 2022 as they had been then, perhaps even more so, after what her own investigation had revealed (García Deister 2016). Back in 2016, I had asked “Who guarantees the privacy of the information included in genetic databases? Who safeguards the biological samples and protects the genetic data? Who assures us that the collection of DNA samples has a legal basis? Who assures us that the data are not used for illegal purposes? What are the ethical and legal recommendations related to the international flow of genetic data stored in these databases?” Wendy continues in her prologue to the book:

I told Paula about this piece, and she was also excited. I wrote the researcher, eager to learn more about her work. In a talk she gave at the Society for the Social Studies of Science conference in 2020, García Deister had raised some ideas about what she thought of the excessive focus on DNA as a “solution” to the forensic crisis and of genetic databases understood as a product – susceptible to commoditization – instead of being understood as an infrastructure. The academic was hitting the theoretical nail on the head of what we as journalists would encounter a year later, with real characters and situations. (Pérez 2022)

And with this mutual realization that Wendy and I had been researching and writing about the same issue in parallel for years, without knowing it, the entanglement between my STS and her journalism became explicit. Based on my research into public engagement with genetics ten years ago, I had come across the increasing attention that Mexican publics were giving to forensic DNA (García-Deister and López-Beltrán 2015). I had raised certain ethical and procedural issues in a critical op-ed in Animal Político, but this was still six years before the message that I was trying to convey hit the radar in a more mainstream way, with “real characters and situations,” once Wendy and Paula’s report was published. This story of how our paths converged also illustrates why journalists and academics will continue to need each other, and how we can collaborate without losing our authorship or identities. Our main timeframes, audiences, and outlets will continue to be different, but we can co-inhabit public space to pursue a more sophisticated understanding of science and raise the issues that matter. To make this area of STS more public, we could lean into this overlap and entanglement. Both STS and journalism work best when they offer “a faceted vision of the world” (Guerriero 2018) through narratives that are neither simplistic nor reductionist, nor do they aspire to be totalizing.

As I embark on a new role as Editor-in-Chief of Tapuya, I will seek to make space for this and other kinds of public STS scholarship. STS needs multiple forms of engagement; of being worldly; of going public. With the evolving landscape of STS publications, contact between Tapuya and fellow STS journals (such as CTS: Revista iberoamericana de ciencia, tecnología y sociedad; East Asian Science, Technology and Society; Engaging Science, Technology and Society; Science, Technology, & Human Values; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technocience) is more attainable, as is the pursuit of transnational (Khandekar et al. 2022), trans-journal (Monteiro Neves 2022), or even unscripted collaborations (the idea of having a bi-annual STS Editors Forum was recently proposed by Timothy Neale, editor of ST&HV). Tapuya faces the particular challenge of making Latin American and other “peripheral” STS scholarship known, available, and significant to a global academic audience. I accept the challenge, and I am grateful for the opportunity to build on the tremendous work of the journal’s founding editorial team while I am also given the freedom to envisage the future five years of Tapuya’s unique epistemic infrastructure.

Thank you, and onward. Obrigada e em diante. Gracias y adelante.

Notes

1 https://articulo19.org/periodistasasesinados/

2 The piece is available at: https://periodismo-mexicano.mx/actualidad/traficantes-de-adn-ganador-del-premio-nacional-de-periodismo-2021/.