•  lima
• Monday, June 13, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Peruvian President-elect Ollanta Humala will push the legal system to investigate and prosecute those responsible for a massive forced sterilisation campaign targeting poor indigenous women carried out by the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), said the spokeswoman for Humala's party, Aída García Naranjo.

'Humala will live up to the Peruvian state's commitment to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to prevent impunity in the case of victims of female and male sterilisations, which we consider a crime against humanity,' García Naranjo told IPS.

'Democracy is not possible in a country where an absence of justice and a sense of collective amnesia are promoted,' said the representative of the Gana Perú party.

Under a friendly settlement agreement reached in 2003 with the IACHR, the Peruvian state acknowledged its responsibility, recognised the abuses committed under the family planning programme, and undertook to investigate and bring to trial the government officials who devised and implemented the campaign that carried out tubal ligations and vasectomies among mainly impoverished native rural highlands populations.

In 2010, however, the representative of the Peruvian government announced to the Washington-based IACHR that the attorney general's office had shelved the case. The only condition of the friendly settlement met by the Peruvian state was the indemnification of the family of María Mestanza, who died in 1998 as a result of a poorly performed surgical sterilisation procedure done without her consent.

But when the case was shelved, the possibility of obtaining justice for Mestanza and her family was effectively closed off. According to Health Ministry statistics, 346,219 women and 24,535 men were sterilised between 1993 and 2000. A full 55 percent of the surgical procedures were carried out in 1996 and 1997 alone, a period during which the armed forces and police were allowed to take part in the operations.

That means an average of 262 tubal ligations a day were performed in that two year period, as part of the National Programme for Reproductive Health and Family Planning, carried out by coercion and deceit under the guise of an anti-poverty plan.

The programme was designed and implemented by the government of Fujimori, who is currently in prison for human rights crimes and corruption.

A 2001-2003 investigation by the Peruvian Congress documented cases in which women died as a result of operations that were poorly done or carried out in unhygienic conditions, and determined that the authorities had set quotas for the number of women to be sterilised, in exchange for benefits for the participating health personnel.

The pending question of the victims of forced sterilisation was one of the touchiest issues discussed in the televised debate between Humala and his right-wing rival, Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the former president, ahead of the Jun. 5 runoff.

The nationalist former military officer, who won a second-round victory campaigning on a leftist platform, urged Keiko Fujimori to take a public stance on the question of the sterilisations that affected so many poor native women during her father's administration.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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