Genetics and ethics in Latin America.

Abstract

If genetics has shown, at the same time, the enormous wealth of human variability and the scarcity of their genetic differences (which can be much less between very distinct populations than between two persons from the same population), prejudice and racism are still there, difference is not always well accepted, and human rights of individual persons or entire populations continue to be violated throughout the world. Genetic forms of determinism and reductionism, as applied to behaviours and personality, accompany and generate contempt for the disadvantaged and lead to the abandonment of policies to combat social inequality, poverty, hunger and crime. Genetics, as any other science, is not neutral. On the one hand, it has been used to build pseudo-scientific theories legitimising racism, colonialism, eugenics and ethnic genocides. On the other hand, however, it has also shown its extreme usefulness in the defence of human rights, from the identification of the remains of missing persons to the restoration of genetic identity of children of political prisoners who were appropriated by supporters of dictatorial regimes and state terrorism, often after their parents had been murdered. The long and the recent history of Latin America bring these starkly to the fore (Sequeiros 2012). In Latin countries (on both sides of the Atlantic), there were eugenic associations andmovements for “purity of race” (closely linked to fascist regimes and the various dictatorships endured in many of those countries), which defended the concept of “inferior peoples”. These theories legitimised “conquest” and the genocide of indigenous peoples, justified colonialism and slavery, and helped in creating societies based on “pigmentocracy”.