WUNRN
Peru - Forced Sterilisation Women Seek Justice, Again!
By Ángel Páez
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LIMA, Oct
15, 2010 (IPS) - Poor, rural, Quechua-speaking women in the Peruvian
In May 2009,
Jaime Schwartz, the public prosecutor investigating the case against four
former health ministers of the Alberto Fujimori administration (1990-2000),
decided to shelve the investigation. He said the case involved alleged crimes
against the victims' life, body and health, and manslaughter, and that the
statute of limitations had expired.
But the
plaintiffs in the case had brought accusations of genocide and torture, which
as crimes against humanity have no statute of limitation. The
attorney-general's office upheld Schwartz's decision, overruling the complaint
lodged against it by the victims and the human rights organisations providing
them with legal advice.
Now the
Women's Association of Forced Sterilisation Victims of Anta, a mountainous
province in the southern department of
The
Association's approximately 100 members are rural women whose testimonies have
revealed the hidden side of the National Programme for Reproductive Health and
Family Planning, imposed by coercion and deceit under the guise of an
anti-poverty plan.
Sabina
Huillca, 41, told IPS: "I remember perfectly the day they sterilised me
against my will, because what they did to me made me suffer ever since. It was
August 24, 1996," she said, trying to keep her voice calm.
She is one
of the witnesses who will testify before the justice authorities against those
who devised and implemented the programme.
"After
giving birth to my fourth daughter, I went to the Izcuchaca health centre to
see the doctor. He told me not to have any more children and to have voluntary
surgical contraception (VSC)," she said.
"I told
him 'No'. 'You're silly', he said, 'you will have more children and you won't
be able to raise them'." While she lay resting on a bed, a nurse gave her
an injection. "I didn't know, and no one told me, that it was an
anaesthetic," she said.
"When I
woke up, my hands and feet were tied to the bed with bandages. I was
immobilised. I could see them finishing off some stitches. 'What have you done
to me!'" I shouted.
"'We're
nearly done,' the doctor said, and I started to cry. 'I don't want this, I
don't want this!' I shouted in despair. But the damage was already done,"
said Huillca, who was 28 years old at the time.
"Nada
personal" (Nothing Personal), a 1998 report by human rights lawyer and
activist Giulia Tamayo, commissioned by the Peruvian section of the Latin
American and Caribbean Committee for the Defence of Women's Rights (CLADEM),
describes the coercive nature of the VSC programme.
The study
documented for the first time the systematic use of sterilisation practices
that particularly targeted poor, indigenous, rural women.
As a result
of the publication, Tamayo received threats from the government. She had to
leave the country and went to live in
The Peruvian
state has admitted that 300,000 sterilisations were performed under the VSC
programme. The ombudsman's office has collected direct testimony from 2,074
women who were sterilised without their consent between 1996 and 2000.
"The
power structures that protected the authors of criminal acts are still in
place, guaranteeing their impunity up to the present day. This means that the
rights of women who suffered from mass forced sterilisation continue to be
violated," Tamayo told IPS.
In 2003, the
Peruvian state signed a friendly settlement agreement before the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in the case of Mamérita Mestanza, who died
in 1998 as a result of a poorly performed tubal ligation procedure done without
her consent.
The state
acknowledged its responsibility, recognised the abuses committed under the
family planning programme, undertook to investigate and bring to trial the
government officials who devised and implemented the campaign, and promised to
pay reparations to Mestanza's family.
But the
attorney-general's office dragged its feet on the promised investigation, which
made little progress before it was shelved by the public prosecutor in 2009.
Meanwhile Alejandro Aguinaga, one of the accused, a former health minister and
personal physician to Fujimori, was elected to Congress in 2006 and is now vice
president of the legislature.
Fujimori is
in prison for 25 years, convicted of several charges of corruption and human
rights violations.
The state's
failure to carry out this part of the friendly agreement "is prolonging
the pain of thousands of victims, because the accused are carrying on as
respectable members of society when they really should be called to account in
the courts," said Tamayo, who is also a researcher for the Spanish chapter
of the global rights watchdog Amnesty International.
"This
time, those responsible for the forced sterilisation plan will be sued
individually for crimes against humanity and torture," she said.
Each of the
accused will also be charged "for war crimes, because the coerced sterilisation
was carried out in the context of the 1980-2000 armed conflict (between the
military and leftwing guerrillas), when the armed forces were used to threaten
and terrorise" the civilian population, Tamayo said.
Specifying
international crimes (which include crimes against humanity, genocide, torture
and war crimes) will allow "other countries to prosecute the accused, if
the Peruvian state continues to protect them," she said.
"The
IACHR has already indicated that forced sterilisation is a matter of
international law," the rights activist said.
Tamayo said
the lawsuit will be brought by the victims in Anta, because in that province
"sterilisation was implemented door to door, the health authorities were
given 'quotas' of sterilised women that they were required to meet, and all the
victims belonged to the same indigenous ethnic group."
This shows
that "those who designed the programme defined its targets with abominable
precision," Tamayo said.
One of the
first to take up the fight for justice in the case of coerced sterilisations
was the now famous Quechua-speaking lawmaker Hilaria Supa, a native of Anta,
one of whose daughters is a victim of the VSC programme.
"Since
the operation, to this day, I have suffered because of what was done to me by
force," said Huillca, who lives in the rural
"They
damaged me as a woman. After that I was not able to pick up my small children,
or work in the fields, which our livelihood depends on. I can't even cook,
because I get terrible pains," she said, describing little-known
consequences borne by the victims.
"I have
difficulty walking; my life is full of suffering. Furthermore, in the community
I am treated as second-rate, because in the village a woman who does not work
is very much looked down on," she continued, no longer able to hide her
sadness.
"The
worst of it all is that one of the doctors who damaged me for life is still
working in the Izcuchaca health centre," she said. "Every time I see
him I feel furious, because nothing has happened to him."