"Antigone's forensic DNA database. The Politics of 'futile' technologies & the search for the disappeared in Mexico" Ernesto Schwartz-Marin (Durhan University)

In this paper I consider what would happen if Antigone had a DNA database to give another kind of voice to the disappeared, and build another politics around forensic humanitarian intervention. I ask, what sort of voice and politics would that be? I aim to answer this question by thinking through the relationships between futility, forensic technologies and the notion of a liberal political subject as it is articulated in contemporary Mexico; a country where more than 150,000 people have been killed, 25-27,000 remain disappeared and more than 15,000 corpses are waiting to be identified. The Antigone(s) in my story are the families and individuals that constituted the governance body of a project known as ‘Citizen-Led Forensics’ which brought to the world the first forensic DNA database created, managed and designed by relatives of the disappeared in Mexico. I show that the identification of thousands of bodies in mass graves, or the location of missing people is a political matter through and through, and a DNA forensic database created by those seeking to identify their loved ones is seen by some groups of allies and enemies, as a dangerous and destabilising force. I argue that it is only once technologies are not bound by principles of efficiency, market logics, or exclusive expertise, that danger and defiance becomes a fertile ground for a politics of justice to emerge; a politics of justice that can transgress the old tropes of individual vs. collective rights, and thus throw new light on the unexamined state-centric notions of forensic humanitarianism and the potential of a citizen-led science.