More than 270,000 women and 22,000 men were sterilised as part of a government-run birth control programme between 1996 and 2000, according to official figures from Peru's health ministry.
Sterilization was a covert part of Fujimori’s “family planning” policy, which purported to give women “the tools necessary [for them] to make decisions about their lives.” But in fact, as revealed in government documents published by the Peru human rights ombudsman’s office in 2002, the regime saw controlling birth rates as a way to fight “resource depletion” and “economic downturn.”
These were euphemisms for what Fujimori, and past leaders of Peru, referred to as the “Indian problem” – higher birth rates among Indigenous people than Peruvians of European descent. And since Indigenous women of Quechua descent had the highest poverty rates in Peru, they were the government’s main target for “family planning.”
Nearly a quarter century later, Peru’s judiciary is expected to decide this April if it will open a trial against the president at the time, Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), who is already in prison on a different human rights case, and three of his health ministers because of the sterilization program. The state’s prosecutor wants Judge Rafael Martínez to order Fujimori to stand trial as the indirect perpetrator on two counts, serious injury leading to death and serious injury leading to human rights violations. The prosecutor, Pablo Espinoza, maintains that the Fujimori government inflicted bodily harm and death on women and men in rural areas and urban shantytowns in a deliberate strategy targeting the poor with sterilization.
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