Peru's ex-President faces forced sterilization charges

[Judi Lynn]

By Sara Shayanian | April 27, 2018 at 10:01 AM

April 27 (UPI) -- Peru's former president is facing charges over alleged forced sterilization of women during his time in office.

Alberto Fujimori, the ex-president of Peru, and three of his former health ministers, Marino Costa Bauer, Eduardo Yong and Alejandro Aguinaga, will be issued new charges over the forced sterilization of five women that reportedly took place while he was in office.

Between 1990 and 2000, when Fujimori was in office, around 300,000 women had the surgery as part of a government program. Although it was meant to be a voluntary procedure, thousands say they did not give their consent.

Over 2,000 people have filed lawsuits against the sterilizations and data showing that 18 women died as a result of the procedures.

The procedures were mainly done on poor, indigenous women -- many of whom claim they were harassed, threatened and blackmailed into complying.

More:
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2018/04/27/Perus-ex-President-faces-forced-sterilization-charges/2341524834568/?utm_source=sec&utm_campaign=sl&utm_medium=1

[Judi Lynn]

1. Earlier article: Forced sterilization and impunity in Peru

Forced sterilization and impunity in Peru
MARIELLA SALA 10 February 2014

Between 1995-2000, 300,000 women in Peru, mostly poor indigenous peasants who did not speak Spanish, were forcibly sterilized by the Fujimori government. The Peruvian feminist movement has been trying to bring Fujimori and his officials to trial for this crime against humanity ever since. Last month the case was thrown out for a second time.

In 1995, then-President Alberto Fujimori met with Peruvian feminists at the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing and announced he would liberalize Peru’s strict laws on contraception by allowing women to have their tubes tied without getting their husbands’ permission. For Peruvian feminists, who had been fighting for more reproductive rights against powerful opposition from the Catholic Church and Opus Dei, this was a victory. They had no idea that the Fujimori government would use the new law to forcibly sterilize three hundred thousand indigenous women in the Andes between 1995 - 2000.

There are many historical instances of forced sterilization, which is currently being practised on HIV-positive women in Namibia, for purposes of population control in Uzbekistan, and against the Roma in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It is among the offenses listed as crimes against humanity by the Rome Statute of 2005: “Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity.”

In the case of Peru, because most of the peasant women who were sterilized only spoke Quechua or Aymara, and many of them did not know how to name what had happened to their bodies even in their own language, it took a while for the story to reach women’s human rights advocates in Lima. In 1996, Giulia Tamayo from CLADEM, a Latin American feminist lawyers’ network, began investigating the crime and in 1999 she published a report, Nada Personal – A human’s right report about how the sterilization program has injured thousands of women. At the same time Hilaria Supa, an indigenous leader of the peasant women’s federation in the district of Anta, began to work with MAM Fundacional (Movimiento Amplio de Mujeres) and CLADEM to investigate the issue. Supa, who is fluent in both Spanish and Quechua, discovered that hundreds of women in her community had been sterilized against their wills, and founded the Asociación de Mujeres Afectadas por las Esterilizaciones Forzadas de Anta (AMAEF), organizing survivors from the communities and districts of Anta and Cusco.

More:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/mariella-sala/forced-sterilization-and-impunity-in-peru

[Judi Lynn]

2. Fujimori's genocide frames Peruvian politics

ICT Staff • August 7, 2002

Peru, the most populous Indian nation in South America, now under Quechua president Alejandro Toledo, just admitted that it forcefully sterilized over 200,000 Indian women between 1996 and 2000 during the regime of former President Alberto Fujimori.

This terrible news, in the form of an actual apology by the Peruvian Health Ministry, confirms occasional reports of the past few years. What is perhaps less expected is the huge number of women subjected to the practice. From all indications, the campaign was directed at Indian women from traditional villages in the Andean Mountains. It has caused a radical demographic drop.

Peru was seriously ransacked in the 1990s during the regime of Alberto Fujimori, a Japanese-Peruvian who ruled the country through military repression. During the Fujimori years, with the consistent backing of the U.S. government, Peruvians endured dozens of massacres and thousands of individual killings. A lot of it happened at the command of Fujimori’s secret police and military squads. Fujimori is now in exile in Japan.

The sterilizations of Indian women occurred under the worst of conditions. Illegal as a birth control method in this largely Catholic country of 26 million people, sterilization for contraceptive purposes was legalized by Fujimori’s government in 1995. With substantial assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), teams of doctors and nurses scoured the highlands, targeting Quechua and Aymara communities. Officials threatened, bribed or misled women to submit to the operation. Health workers, trained by U.S. personnel, were under obligation to meet quotas. They “sometimes visited individual women several times as the hard sell for sterilization became steadily more aggressive,” according to an early report on the Peruvian sterilization controversy that appeared in Native Americas magazine (summer 2000).

More:
https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/fujimoris-genocide-frames-peruvian-politics/