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 Some 350,000 women were sterilized in the mid-1990s under a program
promoted by former president Alberto Fujimori, who argued a lower
birth rate was crucial to eliminating poverty in Peru.
Many were sterilized without their knowledge and consent, and those
who refused were often threatened with a fine or prison, say
activists who view the campaign as one of Peru's biggest human
rights scandals.
More than 2,000 women have given statements to Peruvian and
international rights groups and prosecutors saying they underwent
sterilization without being informed or consenting.
The government's public prosecutor had opened investigations into
the forced sterilizations, the first in 2009 and most recently last
year.
But last week, the prosecutor opted to close its investigation into
complaints by 77 women. Another investigation into more than 2,000
other women was closed this past summer.
Demus, a Lima-based non-profit women's group, filed an appeal this
week asking for the decisions to be reversed.
The government is denying these women the right to continue seeking
justice, said Demus attorney Milton Campos in a video posted by the
group.
One of those women is farmer Inés Condori, who told the Thomson
Reuters Foundation she was sterilized in 1995 when she went to a
hospital for a check-up after the birth of her fourth child.
She traveled several hours from her remote village to a hospital in
the southeastern city of Cusco, helped by a woman she said she met
in the street who said she knew how to get there.
At the hospital, she recalls seeing women lying on the floor.
"There were no stretchers. They were shouting, vomiting," Condori
said.
Given an injection, she said she woke up hours later in terrible
pain.
The hospital staff told her she would no longer have children and
would be "young again".
"To this day, I don't know what kind of surgery they did on me," she
said.
POOR, ILLITERATE INDIGENOUS WOMEN
Fujimori, in prison for graft and human rights abuses during his
1990-2000 authoritarian rule, was cleared in 2014 of any wrongdoing
linked to the program.
Prosecutors have said three of Fujumori's health ministers cannot be
held responsible for the forced sterilizations.
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Nevertheless, "there are plenty of people involved in this matter
who are still enjoying their freedom because they haven't been
prosecuted," said Sandro Monteblanco, a Lima criminal attorney.
Others have been tried but acquitted, said Monteblanco, an outspoken
critic of the government on its handling of the sterilizations.
"Nobody has taken this case and dissected it in order to determine
all of the guilty parties," he said.
Monteblanco said he sees little hope that the administration of
President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, which assumed power in July, will
support efforts for the women's cases to move forward.
"It's a taboo that forbids many government officials from daring to
make any kind of statement about it," he said.
The state must acknowledge the violence inflicted on the women, said
Marina Navarro, Amnesty International director in Peru.
"The state is not recognizing its responsibility," she said. "That
is the most basic thing that is needed right now."
Many of the women sterilized were indigenous peasants from the
nation's poorest areas. Those who signed consent forms in Spanish
were illiterate and spoke only the indigenous Quechua language,
rights groups say.
Nearly two decades later, many of these women suffer psychological
and physical damage, Navarro said.
Condori has been unable to do physically demanding agricultural or
domestic work.
"Eventually, this too will be yet another horrendous occurrence in
the long list of dark occurrences in this country that gets swept
under the rug or simply becomes a couple of paragraphs in our
history book," Monteblanco said.
(Reporting by Sophie Davies, editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Alisa
Tang. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable
arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's
rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit
http://news.trust.org)
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
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