Former president will not be tried; radical feminists grandstand
by Steven W. Mosher and Anne Roback Morse
Fifteen years ago, Peruvian
President Alberto Fujimori, with the strong encouragement of the Clinton
administration, ordered a nationwide sterilization campaign. At least
300,000 women were sterilized by “mobile sterilization teams” on a
Chinese model, many under duress. Some died.
PRI sent a team of investigators into the country,
documented the abuses, and held press conferences and congressional
hearings in the U.S. and Peru. Because of our work, the sterilization
campaign ground to a halt.
But Fujimori and his health ministers have never been
called to account for these human rights abuses. And now it appears
that they won’t be. The Peruvian state prosecutor Marco Guzman dropped
the charges last Friday, because he was not convinced that the enforced
sterilizations were “widespread or systemic.”
In fact, they were both.
Elected to a second presidential term in mid-1995,
Fujimori, with the encouragement of the Clinton State Department and the
U.N. Population Fund, ordered his Ministry of Health to focus its
efforts on sterilizing women by tubal ligations. He set national targets
for the number of sterilizations—100,000 in 1997 alone—and demanded
weekly progress reports. These targets and quotas alone are prima facie
evidence of serious problems, since they were banned by the 1994 Cairo
population conference on the grounds that they always lead to abuses.
PRI investigators found that the mobile sterilization teams
were comprised of doctors and nurses who often had no previous training
in obstetrics or gynecology, but were nevertheless sent out to the
countryside to sterilize women at grotesquely misnamed “ligation
festivals.” Officials brought women to the sterilization sites by
subjecting them to harassment, verbal abuse, and threats. Among other
things, they told the indigenous Peruvian women that, unless they
submitted, their children would be denied medical care or food
assistance.
Fujimori was originally prosecuted for genocide, which under international law is defined as “any
of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:... (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” (emphasis added).
The case can certainly be made that the Peruvian
sterilization campaign was genocidal, since it pitted the ‘haves’—the
largely urban descendants of Francisco Pizarro’s conquistadores—against
the ‘have-nots’—the largely rural descendants of the ancient Incas. The
majority of the sterilization teams were sent to the altiplano,
or the Andean mountain valleys, and the majority of the sterilizations
were done on the Quechua-speaking inhabitants of those regions. This
concentration on the impoverished Indios, living a hardscrabble existence on mountain plots, is why these crimes could rightly be characterized as genocide.
After the Peruvian prosecutor dropped the charge of
genocide, human rights groups then tried to convict Fujimori for crimes
against humanity. Crimes against humanity are defined as: “any of
the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic
attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the
attack:…(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced
pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity….” (emphasis added).
Despite the evidence, Guzman dropped these charges against
Fujimori as well. We agree with the director of the center for legal
studies at C-FAM, Stefano Gennarini, that this move “is indicative of
how much currency population control still has, and how countries don't
value the rights of poor and marginalized groups."
Fujimori’s case was the first criminal trial for systemic
forced sterilizations since the Nuremberg trials. And it is important
because it could have set a precedent. After all, those who do not
remember history are doomed to repeat it, and we do not want other women
to have to go through the pain that many Peruvian women suffered.
Some of the families of women who died from being
sterilized under duress still have not received the compensation
promised them. Mamerita Mestanza died as a result of a botched tubal
ligation in 1998. Her husband and seven children were promised 120,000
USD in compensation in 2003, but they still haven't received a penny.
Meanwhile, the radical feminists who control the Ministry
of Women's Affairs ministry continue to draw their salaries while
continuing to push poor Peruvian women into "Reproductive Health"
programs that have nothing to do with reproduction and sometimes damage
their health.
Fujimori light, you might call it.
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You can see PRI documentation of the abuses in Peru here:
Testimonies and Interviews:
Briefings and Reports:
The
pro-life Population Research Institute is dedicated to ending human rights
abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending
counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of
"overpopulation." Find us at pop.org.
