True Story!
In 1975, the military in Argentina overthrew the government of Isabel Peron. This rigid, ideological military would not tolerate its enemies. The military governor gave a speech to the public saying, "First, we will kill all the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators, then their sympathizers, then those who remain indifferent, and finally, we will kill the timid." They had many enemies, including the Marxists, Zionists, Free Masonry, liberals, evangelicals, Anglicans, and the Rotary Club. The military set out in a systemic fashion to eradicate the opposition and to terrorize society. They did so with sweeps through neighborhoods, picking up subversives and non-subversives, taking whole families at times. Many people disappeared, and no one knew because of the lack of coverage. They only knew if their own children had disappeared.
Eventually, after the fall of the government, the Commission on the Disappearances of Persons found 9,000 documented cases of disappearances. As these cases began to build up, older women (usually grandmothers) of young men and women in their 20s and 30s began to meet and act as support groups for one another, looking for their lost children. They began to talk, and they began to march, and they began to protest. As they protested, people came to them and shared stories of how children began appearing in military families that were previously childless, and the wife was not pregnant. These children were coming from the women who were imprisoned. Doctors were blindfolded and forced to help in the delivery of children, then blindfolded again and returned to the streets. Women giving birth have told the doctors their names and have asked them to tell their mothers. The doctors who did tell were killed.
Phony birth certificates began showing up at schools a few years down the road, and the grandmothers were told. After the fall of the military in 1983, the grandmothers contacted the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and asked for help in identifying and proving that these were there children. They demanded that genetics be used to do it.
Mary Claire King, a professor at the University of California Berkeley, worked with the grandmothers to search for the children. She began trying to get court orders for some of the children taken into military families, to do some sort of genetic typing, and show that they belonged to these biological grandparents.
At first simple HLA typing was used (typing of cell surface markers), but this was not effective. DNA fingerprinting was also used, but for technical reasons did not work. So, Dr. King began looking at mitochondrial DNA. It is a small bit of DNA, but what's important is that you get it from your mother. It is only passed on in the egg, not the sperm. In theory, if snippets of unique, variable sequence mitochondrial DNA can be read, maternal lineage can be traced.
One example of the use of this technique is with a woman named Heidi Llemos. She and her adult daughter and son-in-law were all kidnapped by the military. She was tortured and eventually released. Her adult daughter and son-in-law were eventually killed. The daughter was two months pregnant at the time she was picked up, and a prisoner told Heidi that her daughter was able to give birth in prison. Heidi spent ten years looking for her grandchild, and eventually found a child living with a woman who had been the military guard in charge of female prisoners. It was quite plausible that this child was her daughter's, and she demanded that the courts do DNA testing. Mitochondrial DNA sequences were obtained under court order, and were found to match perfectly between the girl and Heidi.
This is just one story of how forensics can be used, even though it is not truly a criminal court case. There are many others that use these techniques to convict killers and set the innocent free.
This is a site created for ISSI470, an academic course at Monmouth College.