Juan Vucetich, a Croatian-Argentine police official working in La Plata, Argentina, developed the first usable fingerprint classification system and in 1891 began using it at the Buenos Aires police identification bureau. In 1892, Vucetich used fingerprint evidence to solve a murder case — the Rojas case — making it the world's first criminal conviction based on fingerprint identification. Argentina thus became the first country in the world to officially adopt dactyloscopy as a forensic identification system.

The Argentine adoption of fingerprinting before any European country is a striking example of forensic innovation occurring outside the Western European metropole. Borges, writing from Buenos Aires decades later, drew on the labyrinthine logic of criminal identity and evidence in stories like La muerte y la brújula, situating the detective puzzle within an Argentine context shaped partly by this early forensic culture. Latin American detective fiction, as a distinct literary tradition, traces roots to this pioneering evidence culture.