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Bringing the Dead Back into Society: An Interview with Mercedes Doretti
- Social Research: An International Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 83, Number 2, Summer 2016
- pp. 511-534
- 10.1353/sor.2016.0039
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, EAAF) was one of the world’s first professional war crimes exhumation groups to produce evidence against governments and military personnel involved in human rights violations. In 2009, cofounder Mercedes Doretti expanded the EAAF’s work by establishing the Border Project in response to the large number of cases of disappeared migrants along the migrant trail from Central America to the United States, exposing the full extent of migrant deaths and disappearances in the region. In this interview, Doretti addresses the role of forensics in processes of mourning, the difficult question of the rights of the dead, and the ethical and political aspects of the EAAF’s work that can exceed the original mandate of providing scientific evidence and identification.