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Related: About this forumPeru reopens probe into mass sterilisations - rights groups
Peru reopens probe into mass sterilisations - rights groups
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation - Thu, 14 May 2015 17:53 GMT
By Anastasia Moloney
BOGOTA, May 14 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A top law enforcement official in Peru has ordered the reopening and expansion of a criminal investigation into the alleged forced sterilisation of thousands of indigenous people.
During the 1990s, nearly 350,000 women and 25,000 men were sterilised during a programme led by the government of former president Alberto Fujimori to reduce the birth rate. The programme focused on indigenous and poor people in rural areas of Peru.
Some 2,073 women have given statements to local and international rights groups saying that they had their tubes tied without their knowledge or consent, and at least 18 women died as a result of the surgery.
In January 2014, shortly after learning that Peru had closed an investigation into the sterilisation program and had cleared Fujimori and others in his government by saying no crimes against humanity had been committed, human rights groups filed a complaint.
More:
http://www.trust.org/item/20150514175414-7c2dr/
Judi Lynn
(160,211 posts)Forced sterilization and impunity in Peru
Mariella Sala 10 February 2014
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In 1995, then-President Alberto Fujimori met with Peruvian feminists at the UN Womens Conference in Beijing and announced he would liberalize Perus strict laws on contraception by allowing women to have their tubes tied without getting their husbands permission. For Peruvian feminists, who had been fighting for more reproductive rights against powerful opposition from the Catholic Church and Opus Dei, this was a victory. They had no idea that the Fujimori government would use the new law to forcibly sterilize three hundred thousand indigenous women in the Andes between 1995 - 2000.
There are many historical instances of forced sterilization, which is currently being practised on HIV-positive women in Namibia, for purposes of population control in Uzbekistan, and against the Roma in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It is among the offenses listed as crimes against humanity by the Rome Statute of 2005: Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity.
In the case of Peru, because most of the peasant women who were sterilized only spoke Quechua or Aymara, and many of them did not know how to name what had happened to their bodies even in their own language, it took a while for the story to reach womens human rights advocates in Lima. In 1996, Giulia Tamayo from CLADEM, a Latin American feminist lawyers network, began investigating the crime and in 1999 she published a report, Nada Personal A humans right report about how the sterilization program has injured thousands of women. At the same time Hilaria Supa, an indigenous leader of the peasant womens federation in the district of Anta, began to work with MAM Fundacional (Movimiento Amplio de Mujeres) and CLADEM to investigate the issue. Supa, who is fluent in both Spanish and Quechua, discovered that hundreds of women in her community had been sterilized against their wills, and founded the Asociación de Mujeres Afectadas por las Esterilizaciones Forzadas de Anta (AMAEF), organizing survivors from the communities and districts of Anta and Cusco.
They were eventually able to gather testimony documenting 2047 forced sterilizations, most of which took place between1996 -1998. CLADEM found that, in most Andean communities, the Government Health Service had rounded up all the women with children and sterilized them without their consent. Some had died and a huge number had suffered adverse health consequences, their lives devastated. These sterilizations were carried out by a program ironically called Voluntary Surgical Contraception Program, under which physicians were given monthly sterilization quotas and health workers were trained to capture as many women for sterilization as possible.
More:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/mariella-sala/forced-sterilization-and-impunity-in-peru
Those of you who recall DU'er "rabs" may recall this man who was an international journalist, who lived in South America for many, many years expressed to us years ago that this crime against Peruvian Native women was a wildly tragic, vicious, inhumane way to treat human beings, and it was taken as one of the gravest actions against the people of Peru ever since it happened.