Description:

EDEN MEDINA
Informatics and Computing & History, Indiana University

TITLE When Legal Certainty Comes Undone: Science, Technology and the Search for Truth in Post-Pinochet Chile

Description: In the beginning of the 1998 Chilean documentary Fernando ha vuelto (Fernando Is Back), two forensic anthropologists work to identify a body exhumed from Patio 29, a secret burial site used by the military to dispose of over 300 corpses during the Pinochet dictatorship. The scientists identify the remains as belonging to Fernando Olivares, a young political activist who disappeared nearly 25 years earlier. The film shows the identification process, a combination of forensic science and computer technology. For example, the anthropologists digitally superimpose a transparent image of the recovered skull on a photograph of Olivares that they collected from his family. They compare the brow, nose, and eye sockets in both images. They compare the teeth in the skull to a photograph in which Olivares is smiling broadly (his dental records were not available). “To us this is very accurate,” one anthropologist declares. “Teeth are like fingerprints. There can be only one in 300 million. So the chances that this could be another person’s [teeth] are close to zero.” Such identification techniques helped the anthropologists identify 96 bodies between 1993 and 1998; DNA analysis was not available to them. The identifications changed interactions between the victims’ survivors and the state. For example, wives could legally be declared widows. Identification also increased public knowledge of the crimes committed during the Pinochet dictatorship. However, scientific certainty soon became government error. In 2006 the Chilean government announced that the anthropologists had mistakenly identified eight bodies, including that of Olivares. Suddenly the expertise of the anthropologists, and the physical recognition techniques they used, became the subject of national debate. The government eventually informed 48 families that they had received the wrong body. The facts that had been created by the forensic scientists and their computers had come undone. New forensic uses of science and technology may seem to offer a more precise, complete, or objective view of what happened in the past. Yet the Olivares case illustrates that such methods are also contested sites of knowledge production and that their credibility is linked to changing political, legal, and scientific contexts. This talk will explore the limitations of such forms of evidence and what the dangers are in human rights contexts of taking technologies for granted as purveyors of objectivity and truth.

Bio: Eden Medina is Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing, Adjunct Associate Professor of History, and Director of the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research bridges the history of technology and the history of Latin America and asks how studies of technology can enrich our understanding of broader historical processes. She is the author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile and the co-editor of Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology and Society in Latin America. Medina received her Ph.D. from MIT in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology. She also holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University and a Master in Studies of Law from Yale Law School. 

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