The official name for this family planning scheme was Anticoncepción Quirúrgica Voluntaria –AQV

Remembering the dark story of Peru’s population control campaign

BY MICHAEL COOK

I just stumbled across a documentary about the 300,000 women and 22,000 men forcibly or deceitfully sterilised by population control officials in the government of President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s.

We can all learn lessons from this ghastly abuse of human rights. Earlier this year the former president, who is currently serving a 25-year jail sentence for crimes against humanity, was exonerated of blame for the sterilization program. The prosecutor said that he could find no evidence that women had been systematically coerced.

The tears of the women in the documentary suggest otherwise. A committee in the US House of Representatives heard evidence in 1998 that the Fujimori government had given doctors quotas for sterilizations. If they failed to reach their goals, then their contracts might be terminated. “Other abuses, such as lack of informed consent, pressure to consent, bonuses per woman sterilized, and trading food for consent, were probably not mandated by the central government but were the natural outcome of the mandate that the goals must be met.”

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