Tue, Mar 18, 2014 page7

• Peruvians fight for justice over sterilizations

  • The Guardian, LIMA
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  Guillermina Huaman, 42, struggles to find the words in Spanish to express her grief and rage. It is in her mother tongue, Quechua, a language widely spoken in Peru’s southern highlands, that she explains how public healthcare medics terminated her pregnancy at three months during what she thought was a routine checkup.

  She remembers being anesthetized after being told she was to be given vitamins intravenously. When she awoke she saw that her abdomen had been cut and stitched. She had been sterilixed and her fetus aborted.

  “They told me I wasn’t pregnant, but I knew that I was,” she sobbed.

  Hers is one of many accounts of coercion in the forced sterilization of 2,074 poor, rural women, many illiterate and who spoke little Spanish, between 1995 and 2000.

  The women have been fighting for some sort of justice and compensation for years.

  Their legal case began in 2003, when the state paid compensation to the family of Mamerita Mestanza, who died during a surgical sterilization in 1998. In 2004, the Peruvian state pledged before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate and sanction those responsible for the sterilization campaign. Legal proceedings were opened, but then shelved in 2009 only to be reopened in 2011.

  However, in January a judicial investigation was closed after a prosecutor, Marco Guzman, said he found no evidence that women were systematically coerced into sterilization. Lawyers are appealing the decision on the grounds that sufficient evidence of human rights abuses exists. Campaigners say they have succeeded in ensuring that a senior prosecutor would re-examine the case.

  Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, who was in office between 1990 and 2000, is serving a 25-year sentence for authorizing death squad killings and corruption. Both he and one of the investigated health ministers, Alejandro Aguinaga, now a congressman for his political party, maintain the sterilizations were consensual.

  “You can’t force someone into the operating room. This was a reproductive health program with backing from international institutions,” Aguinaga said.

  In 1995, the Peruvian government legalized surgical sterilization. The “voluntary surgical contraception” (VSC) program began as part of a poverty reduction campaign.

  Fujimori wanted to reduce the birthrate from an average of more than 3.7 births a woman in 1995. According to World Bank figures, the birthrate stood at 2.5 by 2011.

  The US agency for international development, USAid, gave US$25 million over five years to women’s rights non-governmental organization Manuela Ramos to implement ReproSalud, a family planning program that included VSC, but when evidence of the forced sterilizations emerged in 1998, in an investigation by other women’s groups called Nada Personal, Manuela Ramos joined Peru’s human rights ombudsman in reporting the abuses.

  In 1998, Joseph Rees, an adviser to the US House of Representatives Sub-committee for International Operations and Human Rights, said the US should stop all funding for family planning programs until it was clear the “sterilization goals and related abuses” would be discontinued.

  In a 2004 document, USAid says it “denied funding and support to the VSC campaign and took proactive steps towards promoting changes” in the Peruvian government’s strategy, adding that it “separated assistance to ensure no support went to campaigns.”

  “During the campaigns … physicians had to perform a number of surgical interventions in order to reach an annual goal imposed by the Peruvian government,” said Ines Ruiz of the University of Kent, the director of A Futile Voice, a film about Peru’s forced sterilizations. “The women were not only misinformed, taking advantage of the fact they were illiterate or Quechua-speaking, but also had been coerced or threatened that they would not receive food or medicine if they refused.”

  Peruvian heath ministry manuals said the women should be given at least two prior counseling sessions, at which they should be told that the procedure was irreversible and given 48 hours to make a decision. The guidelines were largely ignored.

  Concepcion Condori, 48, a mother of three, was sterilized in 1999 after giving birth.

  “’What have you done to me?’ I asked the nurse. This is by order of the government, she said to me, you people have many children. This is the way it has to be,” Condori said.

  She still suffers abdominal pains and is unable to do any heavy work in her village, but the stigma of infertility has been even harder to bear.

  “It’s as if our bodies are dead. When it comes to intimacy with our husbands there’s no feeling and after they beat us because they say we’re no good for anything,” she said.

  “They took advantage of us because we don’t know how to read and write, because we’re from the country,” said Serafina Illa, 49, another Quechua-speaking woman from Cuzco, who says she was sterilized after giving birth.

  Her baby later died.

  According to the Peruvian health ministry, 346,219 sterilizations were performed on women and 24,535 on men between 1993 and 2000, more than half carried out between 1996 and 1997 alone. It has been suggested that health workers were given cash incentives of about US$10 for every woman they sterilized.

  “If this case does not proceed in the Peruvian courts then we’ll take this to international courts,” said Rossy Salazar, a lawyer with Demus, a Peru-based women’s rights non-governmental organization.
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