The artistic campaign to help 300,000 Peruvian women sterilised against their will

[Judi Lynn]

The artistic campaign to help 300,000 Peruvian women sterilised against their will

During the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of poor women in rural areas of Peru were forcibly sterilised, often without their knowledge - and ahead of the next presidential election, artists are helping campaigners finally find justice.

by Iain Aitch Published 24 November, 2014 - 11:39

The most stirring art has the ability to make us stop, think and even act, but a new interactive documentary made in Peru may just help decide the political future of the whole country. Created as a result of collaboration between the University of Bristol and London-based Chaka Studio, the Quipu project relays the story of a recent and very dark moment in Peruvian history. As many as 300,000 women in rural areas of Peru were possibly hoodwinked into being sterilised during the mid-to-late 1990s, all in the name of bringing an end to poverty.

The scale of the heinous medical campaign remained buried until recently, as the village areas most affected did not know that both neighbouring and far-flung areas had also been hit. Various legal cases on the issue brought against right-wing former-president Alberto Fujimori have hit the buffers and the local headlines, but the story has largely remained unknown outside the urban centres of Peru.

“I was working for Amnesty International in Peru in the 1990s and nobody knew this was going on,” says Matthew Brown of the University of Bristol. “Awareness has been growing in the last three years, partly because of our project and partly because of the efforts of victims groups. These women were sterilised at 20 and now they are coming up to 45 with no one to look after them in old age. That was the community welfare safety net.”

Brown had been looking for a creative way to get the story out there via social media, but it was not until he and fellow researcher Karen Tucker met with the team behind production company Chaka Studio that the solution became clear. The teams hooked up via Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded React Hub, an organisation set up to bring academics, artists and creative businesses together.

More:
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/11/artistic-campaign-help-300000-peruvian-women-sterilised-against-their-will

[Judi Lynn]

1. USAID Supported Fujimori Sterilization Campaign; Seeks to Cover-Up Involvement

USAID Supported Fujimori Sterilization Campaign; Seeks to Cover-Up Involvement

Steven W. Mosher 2003 Sep 1


The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) joined forces with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to support Peru’s aggressive population control program of the late nineties. Then-President Alberto Fujimori was determined to meet international population targets, particularly among Peru’s large ethnic population, and launched an involuntary sterilization campaign with USAID assistance.

A Peruvian official who later complained about USAID involvement, Peru’s former Minister of Health Fernando Carbone, found himself defamed by the U.S. agency, whose pro-abortion partisans were also upset by his opposition to the abortion-inducing morning-after pill. Carbone’s removal from office followed.

Forced Population Control

Following the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994, Fujimori was determined to achieve by force what his Ministry of Health had failed to achieve through voluntary family planning, namely to lower the Peruvian birthrate. With the support of USAID and UNFPA, he devised a national plan to sterilize large numbers of Peruvian women.1 The plan, called the Emergency and Alternative Plan, called for an all-out mobilization of the country’s medical personnel to carry out tubal ligations. Fujimori’s Emergency and Alternative Plan relied upon "sterilization festivals" to round up and sterilize large numbers of women. This plan had USAID’s blessing and support.

In 1997, with support and cooperation from USAID, Fujimori established the Family Planning Policies Coordination National Commission (COORDIPLAN) to fully implement his Emergency Plan. That year alone, almost ninety thousand women were sterilized. Over 300,000 women would be sterilized in all.2 Ethnic women were routinely called "pigs" or “dogs” in order to intimidate them to undergo sterilization. Bribes, incentives, and threats of withholding basic services were also used. Sometimes women were sterilized by brute force, or without their foreknowledge or consent during delivery. Sterilizations took place in filthy, USAID-funded clinics. Several women, including Alejandra Aguirre Auccapina and Juana Rosa Ochoa Chira, died shortly after involuntary sterilization procedures.3

Sterilization Programs Evidence of USAID’s close collaboration with Fujimori’s sterilization campaign abounds. For example, USAID funded programs to train military doctors to perform sterilizations, this at a time when the military was being drafted to help carry out the Emergency Plan. USAID also provided generous funding, on the order of $40 million, to Peruvian "non-governmental organizations" (NGOs) involved in the Emergency Plan. For instance, $5 million went to REPROSALUD, an NGO which was “formed alter an agreement between the Manuela Ramos Movement, ALTERNATIVA and USAID." The purpose of REPROSALUD was to promote to ethnic minorities only those methods of family planning approved by the government, which at the time meant sterilization. Women were to be discouraged from bearing additional children or refusing sterilization. USAID also provided $17 million to the Peruvian Programs for Reproductive Health and Family Planning (PRISMA), which distributed USAID contraceptives "in areas in which sterilization festivals were held" and which served as a clearinghouse for funding smaller NGOs that performed involuntary sterilization. USAID provided $18 million to CARE for training doctors to perform sterilization and supplying sterilization equipment used in the coercive campaigns.4

More:
http://pop.org/content/usaid-supported-fujimori-sterilization-1658