Lists, Maps, and Bones: The Untold Journeys of Citizen-led Forensics in Mexico

Cruz-Santiago, Arely

doi:10.4324/9781003152330-5

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“…Thus, every bone fragment, piece of clothing, so tissue or any kind of remnant that they send to be analysed or stored by the state is a trace of a disappeared person that might be lost in the interior of a broken forensic system that has, historically, lost or misplaced crucial evidence. 86 The incapacity of the Mexican state to control the over ow of corpses, product of the 'War on Drugs' , is not new. Since 2018, families and human rights organisations have been insisting on the creation of an Extraordinary Mechanism of Forensic Identi cation (MEIF) to resolve the existing backlog in the identi cation of bodies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biorecuperation, the epidemic of violence and COVID-19 in Mexico

Cruz-Santiago

Schwartz-Marín

2021

Human Remains and Violence

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COVID-19 has reinstated the sovereign enclosures of corpse management that mothers of the disappeared had so successfully challenged in the past decade. To explore how moral duties toward the dead are being renegotiated due to COVID-19, this article puts forward the notion of biorecuperation, understood as an individualised form of forensic care for the dead made possible by the recovery of biological material. Public health imperatives that forbid direct contact with corpses due to the pandemic, interrupt the logics of biorecuperation. Our analysis is based on ten years of experience working with families of the disappeared in Mexico, ethnographic research within Mexico’s forensic science system and online interviews conducted with medics and forensic scientists working at the forefront of Mexico City’s pandemic. In the face of increasing risks of viral contagion and death, this article analyses old and new techniques designed to bypass the prohibitions imposed by the state and its monopoly over corpse management and identification.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%