From 1996 to 2000, Peru was under the regime of Alberto Fujimori. It was his second time as president and most of the people who lived in the capital city of Lima and other large cities, were excited by the signs of economical improvement that gave the promise of abandoning the terrible economical and social crisis dragged from past
goverments and terrorism. However, for indigenous people and the population of rural communities in the Andes, the scenario was very different.
The Ministry of Health designed the National Reproductive Health Program and Family Planning Project. However, despite what the program’s name suggests, the project was not design to be an epidemic prevention, nor to provide sexual education. It was designed to reduce the number of births in the poorest sectors of Peru through tubal ligation and vasectomy. Until here the perversity of it only refers to the tricky name of the project, but there is also another twist to this terrible part of our history. The program needed to recruit people and around 215,227 women were deemed participants, however their “participation” was not voluntary. Many of them were pressured and threatened, others were anesthetized and sent to the surgical room after giving birth or when they went for a routine vaccination. In other cases the government used free food to motivate the “voluntary” participation. The bottom line, none of these women were fully informed on what their involvement in the program truly consisted of.
The result, more than 200,000 women were sterilized without their consent; they were raped by a secret intervention into their bodies and were stripped of their right to motherhood. All of this executed by, and underthe order, of the Alberto Fujimori government.
In 2002 a legal process against Fujimori and three former health ministers was started. 12 years later the process was archived under the argument that there was no proof the project was an actual systematic policy and that the president was never aware women were being forced against their will.
We are almost at the end of 2014, the victims of this program have not only had to live and suffer the mutilation of their bodies, souls and rights, they have had to endure the injustice and corruption of a legal system that walked all over them, they have had to live with the ignorance and apathy of society, and of other Peruvian women, who are not aware and don’t want to be.
What we do not realize is that by denying the reality of these events, we open the door for future atrocities to happen again. And if it does, Peruvian women, will not be organized, nor aware, nor empathic, to these actions. We will be approving, with our inaction, once again more gender discrimination and violence turning ourselves into accomplices of the repression of authoritarian regimes and the irrevocable damage these policies enact on our bodies and the mutilation of our human rights.
