Experts say the disproportionate targeting of indigenous people reflects Peru’s deep-rooted racial discrimination – with one academic arguing the policy could even be classed as a genocide.
“A genocide occurred – but the targeting of these ethnic groups has gone unnoticed and pushed aside,” says Dr Ñusta Carranza Ko, an associate professor of global affairs and human security, and an expert on indigenous Peruvians.
“Officials held health festivals to promote the policy, but only in rural areas, not in the cities. In moments when health officials gave consent forms, they were in Spanish, not in any Indigenous language.”
Dr Carranza Ko says the policy reflects long-standing ideas of ethnic superiority which were first introduced by the Spanish conquistadors.
“In the colonial period, people from Europe were at the top of the chain, and indigenous people at the bottom – that class structure has carried forward to the present day,” she says. “Anything indigenous is considered negative.”
Dr Carranza Ko says the policies share similarities with those introduced in Canada and the United States in the 1970s, in which indigenous populations were also sterilised.
In these countries, population control also revolved around control of “aboriginal peoples’ land and resources,” and the “denial of indigenous sovereignty,” she says.
‘A lot of women have lost hope’
It took years for the scale of abuse in Peru to become public knowledge, in part because it happened against the backdrop of a brutal internal armed conflict that left nearly 70,000 dead.
“Some Peruvian congressmen pointed to irregularities with the scheme in 1997, but that was it. At that time it was hard for anyone to speak out – if you did, you faced death threats, let alone you might disappear. It was a very repressive time,” Dr Carranza Ko says.
Yet even now, while forced sterilisations are considered a crime against humanity under international law, the vast majority of victims have never received justice in their decades-long legal battle.
The most significant victory was a 2003 settlement before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in which the state agreed to pay compensation to the family of a woman who died after being forcibly sterilised.
In fact, many on the right continue to deny that forced sterilisations ever happened, while perpetrators “practice denialism”, according to lawyer Ms Cedano García.
Marino Costa Bauer, one of the former health ministers, called the family planning campaign an “excellent” programme that reduced the maternal mortality rate.
Mr Fujimori’s daughter Keiko – an influential Peruvian politician who held the role of First Lady during her father’s administration – blamed individual rogue medical practitioners for coerced sterilisations. “I condemn the attitude of these irresponsible doctors,” she said.
In 2015, one anaesthetist, Rogelio Del Carmen Martino, rejected claims that doctors had been over-zealous in their implementation, saying publicly that his team had been ordered to sterilise at least 250 women over four days in 1997. “It was absurd – an offence to the dignity of women and doctors,” Dr Martino told Peruvian paper La Republica.
Mr Fujimori, meanwhile, has always maintained that the procedures were consensual.
Although he was initially cleared of any wrongdoing in relation to Peru’s sterilisation programme in 2009 and 2014, a complaint saw the enquiry reopened in 2011 and 2015, and the penal process is ongoing. In 2007 he was imprisoned for corruption and human rights abuses – including authorising a number of killings carried out by death squads.
Yet in December 2023, Mr Fujimori was released 15 years into his 25-year sentence – a decision human rights groups have called a slap in the face to all of his victims.
Victoria Vigo, a sterilisation victim who has received refugee status in Canada after receiving death threats for campaigning for justice, says she feels “spit on and insulted by Fujimori’s freedom”.
Another investigation that involves thousands of sterilised victims is ongoing, but has been “stalling and stalling,” says Dr Carranza Ko.
“A lot of women throughout the years have lost hope. There was a momentum and that momentum has passed,” says Rosemarie Lerner, a documentarian who has followed the women’s cases since 2011. “People are dying without getting justice.”
Florentina continues to protest but says the numbers of those still willing to speak out has dwindled.
“I can’t remember how many times I have given my testimony, but there has been no response, no justice,” she says. “I feel forgotten by the country. So many years have passed now, but we are still forced to protest on the streets and I am still forced to suffer.”
Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security
