Knowledge and ignorance in forensic identification: the origins of a contested human rights fact

Abstract

In 2006, DNA testing revealed that the Chilean Medical Legal Service had misidentified at least half of the 96 human rights victims whose remains had been exhumed in 1991 from a lot in the Santiago General Cemetery known as Patio 29. Years earlier the government had returned those remains to the victims' families. This examination of the history of that forensic misidentification uncovers the role played by the shifting relations of knowledge and ignorance in establishing the legal facts of those identities. Building on the growing literature in agnotology, the article demonstrates the ways in which the context of dictatorship created varied and overlapping forms of ignorance that continued to shape the outcome of the forensic work even after Chile returned to democracy. By detailing different examples of ignorance production by the state, a human rights organization, and a university department under military surveillance, the article illuminates the diverse ways that the civil–military dictatorship worked against knowledge production in the domains of science and human rights.