Alberto Fujimori, close to being judged by this …

From Lima. Former dictator Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), serving a 25-year sentence for crimes against humanity since 2007, risks a new judicial process for serious human rights violations. On March 1, a judge will determine whether to initiate criminal proceedings for the forced sterilizations practiced by his regime, during which more than 300,000 women and more than 20,000 men were sterilized against their will.. Several of the victims died as a result of the interventions aimed at sterilizing them. The vast majority lived in rural areas and came from indigenous communities, the poorest and most marginalized population in the country. The cases of more than a thousand women victims of these forced sterilizations have been brought to court.

The prosecution requests the opening of criminal proceedings against Fujimori as mediator for crimes of serious injury followed by death. Three of his ministers of health, Alejandro Aguinaga, Marino Costa and Eduardo Yong, as well as former officials of the Ministry of Health are also denounced. They are accused of having decided, planned and ordered, with the former dictator, the policy of forced sterilization. Aguinaga, Fujimori’s imprisoned family doctor, is running for the next April elections with presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the 82-year-old ex-dictator.

The case is brought before the courts after more than twenty years of impunity and a flawed prosecution investigation, which has been closed and reopened several times. The prosecutor’s office opened an investigation in 2002, following a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that ordered the Peruvian state to investigate the sterilizations. forced following the complaint to this body concerning the case of María Mamérita Mestanza, an Andean peasant who was sterilized against her will in March 1998 and died a week later as a result of the operation. After several attempts to archive the file, In 2018, the prosecution finally presented a charge, which will not be seen by a judge until more than two years later.

“If at this next hearing the judge decides to open criminal proceedings, which we hope will happen because there are elements for that, then a judicial investigation will begin under the direction of the judge of first instance, who after this investigation will determine whether or not to proceed with an oral trial. This investigation, being a complex affair, with more than a thousand victims living in remote areas of the country, could take between two and three years. Only then could the oral trial begin, that is, if the judge decides to do so, which we hope will happen, as he could archive the case as well. The oral trial could last another five or six years, only then would we have a sentence. The sanctions against Fujimori and the other defendants could be eight to ten years, ”he said. Page 12 the lawyer Sigfredo Florián, of the Legal Defense Institute (IDL), which defends a group of victims.

The prosecution establishes that the sterilizations were carried out without the authorization of the victims or by obtaining their authorization with deception, without properly informing them. And establish that it was government policy at the time. The accused’s defense indicates that the sterilizations were authorized by the victims, but the testimonies of these victims and the documents saved refute this argument.

“The information we have indicates that the sterilizations were forced. There are the testimonies of the victims which indicate that they were sterilized against their will. And in the cases that have the medical records – most have disappeared, which is a cover-up of evidence – either there is no document authorizing sterilization or there is an authorization signed by the victim but written in Spanish when the victims speak Quechua and do not speak Spanish. They made them sign with deception», Says lawyer Florián.

“Nurses came to pick me up from my house, they took me, to a room, they tied my hands and tied me up,” Norma Mori, one of the thousands of sterilized women, told the newspaper. La República. “I told them no, I always said no, but they forced me”, is the testimony of another victim, Victoria Ccoya.

This case was also brought, by the victims and the organization Justice and Reparation, before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

For Fujimori to stand trial for forced sterilizations, an extension of extradition granted by Chile, the country where he was arrested and from which he was extradited in 2007, since the extradition to be tried in Peru did not include this case. There is still a long way to go, but the long impunity for mass forced sterilizations is starting to be dismantled.