Peru: Alberto Fujimori on trial for sterilization …

Peruvian justice will begin to try dictator Alberto Fujimori for the plan for the forced sterilization of 350,000 women and 25,000 indigenous peasants and villagers, which he served under his government between 1990 and 2000. Fujimori, sentenced in 2009 for crimes committed during his trial, He is due to return to the wharf on March 1.

The sterilization plan had been called the National Family Planning Program and implemented over 272,000 tubal ligatures and approximately 22,000 vasectomiesAccording to data from the Peruvian Ombudsman’s Office, but it is presumed that there have been more cases. Besides Fujimori, former ministers of health Eduardo Yong Motta, Marino Costa Bauer and Alejandro Aguinaga are due to appear.

Most of the men and women who participated in the program were of humble origins, spoke Quechua, and had signed written consent in Spanish that they did not understand. One of them was Josefina Quispe. She was 33 years old and 5 children when she received definitive contraceptive treatment without her consent.

When she woke up from the anesthesia, she was lying on a hospital stretcher and not understanding why her whole body was hurting, she started asking what had been done to her and why she had a scar on her. ‘abdomen, but no one answered him.

“She can no longer have children, we have sterilized her”

Victoria Vigo is another of the indigenous women who was subjected without consent to the “family planning” program. “I was 32 weeks pregnant and not feeling very well, so I went to my doctor. They assessed me and decided to perform an emergency Caesarean section,” Vigo recalls in a dialogue. with the BBC news network. Her baby was born with difficulty breathing and died shortly after.

“A doctor was trying to comfort me by saying, ‘Don’t worry, you are still young, you can have another baby’,” but another doctor replied: “She cannot have any more children. We have sterilized her.”

“I wanted to have more children, but that choice was taken away from me without my permission,” said Vigo, who, a year after being sterilized, began her fight against the authorities who encouraged sterilizations and, after years of litigation, in 2003 compensation. of $ 2,500.

She was the only one who received compensation and she is convinced that she got it because, unlike most people sterilized against their will, she He is middle class, educated and speaks Spanish.

Another of the thousands of cases is that of Mamérita Mestanza Chávez. His is known because he was taken to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). Chávez was 33 years old and had given birth to her seventh child when she began to be harassed by nurses at the health center she attended for her baby’s checkups.

The nurses told her that if she did not agree to the tubal ligation, they would give her fines or jail time. This is how they operated on her without having carried out preliminary studies or provided postoperative care and died eight days after surgery. He left seven orphan children.

$ 30 for each sterilized patient

Fujimori had defended his birth policy on the grounds that it would be a progressive plan offering a wide range of contraceptive methods, including surgical sterilization, which until then had been illegal in Peru.

“But the truth is that instead of promoting a variety of contraceptive methods, there were targets, quotas and a number of sterilizations that health workers had to achieveRosemarie Lerner, director of the Quipu project, which collects and shares testimonies from victims of this Fujimori program, explained in an interview with the BBC.

In dialogue with Nueva Sociedad magazine, Peruvian Congresswoman Tania Pariona agreed and said that “there was a chain of command for the implementation of said policy” and said that “a commission of $ 30 was offered for each sterilized patient in order to meet the objectives “.