Peru launched landmark lawsuit against Alberto Fujimori for forced sterilization of women

Peruvian justice on Monday began a new process against the former president Alberto Fujimori for his alleged involvement in the crime of personal injury followed by death of five women Yes serious injuries to 1,301 other people, who were unwillingly sterilized during the years of his tenure between 1990 and 2000. More precisely, he was accused of indirect responsibility, that is to say that he is considered as the main perpetrator of the crime even though he was not involved in his material commission.

Legal proceedings led by Judge Rafael Martínez begin after 17 years of demands by human rights activists and past obstacles imposed by the prosecution itself, which has put investigations on hold more than once .

The trial is complex and the victims’ defenders have requested the presence of translators of variants of Quechua, the original language of the Andes, because all those concerned are indigenous women who speak this language.

Fujimori was accused along with other members of his government, including his former Minister of Health Alejandro Aguinaga, current congressional candidate of the Fujimori Popular Force party in the legislative elections 2021-2026 and who is also implicated in the Vacunagate scandal, which revealed that hundreds of politicians in the Andean country used their political connections to access the inoculation against the COVID-19 before it’s your turn.

The new prosecutor in charge of the case, Pablo Espinoza, says that sterilizations were forced and carried out in unsanitary conditions. He also said there were cases of women who died from infections after being sterilized.

While ruling Peru, Fujimori announced in 1995 at a convention in China that his government would undertake a plan so that poor Peruvian women could decide how many children they wanted to have.

After launching its application, the press reported on the organization of campaigns to tubal ligation in peasant communities in the country’s high Andes and began collecting complaints from women who claimed to have been sterilized without their knowledge.

“The state had expressed its intention to sterilize all the poor, because there are no victims from other social sectors”Said Espinoza arguing his accusation.

The Ombudsman’s office found that over 200,000 sterilizations and 22,000 vasectomies had been performed, although the precise number of cases carried out under hoaxes is not known. From this universe, more than 2,000 women subsequently denounced that they were forcibly sterilized or without adequate information.

Fujimori, 82, is already one 25-year prison sentence for two massacres committed by the military under his government. Also three other convictions against him, two of them for corruption.

The former dictator does not attend the process and asserts by his defense that he should not be tried in this case because, when he was extradited from Chile in 2007, this charge was not part of the group of crimes for which he was to be tried when he was returned to the country. The former president also faces another trial for the murder of six peasants during his tenure by a military death squad.

(With AP information)

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