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