Peru's Govt Forcibly Sterilized 200,000 Indigenous Women, 1996 - 2001, Why? WaPo
'Peru’s government forcibly sterilized Indigenous women from 1996 to 2001, the women say. Why?' Indigenous women have been demanding justice ever since. The Washington Post, * Feb. 19, 2021. Analysis by Nusta Carranza Ko. - Edited.
Under the authoritarian government of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), thousands of Indigenous Peruvian women say they were forcibly sterilized under a family planning program launched to “promote, prevent, cure, and rehabilitate reproductive health to the highest quality.” Nearly 3 decades later, on Jan. 11, the 1st hearing on Indigenous Peruvian women who say they were coercively sterilized took place.
How did this happen? My research finds that the family planning program, rooted in colonial-era discrimination, targeted people of Indigenous descent who were considered to be the “problem factor for economic development” and sought to coercively control the reproduction of this group to help the economy stabilize and grow. Family planning derailed. Originally, the Reproductive Health & Family Planning Program was regarded by feminist activists as a progressive step toward respecting women’s rights.
🫂 It aimed to increase access to maternal health services. It also sought to provide women with more information about family planning and access to contraception. This approach- and the very idea that women have reproductive rights — put the government at odds with the Catholic Church, a powerful force in Peru. 76% of Peruvians are Catholic; many abide by the Church’s teaching against contraception.
Despite church opposition, the program proceeded.
Months into its implementation irregularities manifested. A human rights lawyer investigated and found program officials had sterilized thousands of women against their will. My research shows that officials sterilized 272,028 people. The majority were poor, rural, Indigenous, Quechua-speaking women. Many women suffered medical complications and some died. What went wrong?... Read More,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/19/perus-government-forcibly-sterilized-indigenous-women-1996-2001-why/
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- Forced sterilization in Peru (Wiki).
Forced sterilization in Peru was a part of a larger effort which was variably described as the ethnic cleansing or genocide of indigenous peoples of Peru that occurred under the government of Alberto Fujimori through his National Population Program, which first outlined such projects in the Plan Verde of the Peruvian Armed Forces.
More than 300,000 Peruvians – the majority of them were impoverished or indigenous women – were sterilized during the rule of the Fujimori administration. The generational shift from the sterilizations resulted in the decimation of rural economies and it also resulted in an increase in poverty in those regions...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_sterilization_in_Peru
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