Peru’s Victims of Forced Sterilization Are Still Fighting for Justice

On December 7, Peru’s Supreme Court annulled an investigation into alleged cases of state-sponsored forced sterilizations, causing further delays in a case that has already stretched over two decades. Notably, the investigation would’ve implicated former President Alberto Fujimori and three of his health ministers.

Between 1996 and 2000, Fujimori oversaw a family planning program under which more than 280,000 women and men were sterilized in Peru — mainly in poor, rural areas. But many patients have said that they were manipulated or coerced into undergoing the surgeries.

Victims and rights advocates have tried to hold Fujimori accountable ever since, but only a day before the Supreme Court annulment, the disgraced leader was released from prison. The Constitutional Tribunal upheld a presidential pardon granted on health grounds in 2017 as Fujimori, 85, was serving a 25-year sentence for ordering the extrajudicial killings of civilians during the internal conflict from 1980 to 2000, when left-wing insurgencies employed terrorist attacks in their campaign against social inequality.

Although Fujimori’s release does not prevent separate investigations from proceeding, many victims received the message that the legal system provides justice only to a few.

“There hasn’t been a sentence for our case yet and Fujimori has already been released and pardoned,” said Inés Condori, president of the Association of Women Affected by Forced Sterilization of Chumbivilcas. “For those who have done wrong, there seems to be justice in Peru, but for us who have been demanding justice for decades, there isn’t any.”

The program was publicly touted as an anti-poverty measure aimed at slowing population growth. Surgical sterilizations were made widely available and promoted over other forms of birth control while medical staff were pressured into fulfilling strict sterilization quotas to keep their jobs or receive promotions.

But since 1998, thousands of victims have come forward, claiming they were sterilized without their consent. And because the policy targeted Indigenous women, victims' advocates charged the government with pursuing a genocide against Indigenous peoples, who have been long scapegoated as a cause of poverty “preventing Peru from modernization.”

At first, many cases were archived over a lack of evidence. Once the program ended in 2000 and many more victims emerged, the attorney general’s office launched an investigation. Prosecutors set the number of victims at 1,365, but researchers believe thousands more were sterilized without receiving full information related to the procedure. According to the attorney general’s office, 18 victims are known to have died from complications derived from the surgeries.

But the office also has shelved and reopened investigations repeatedly on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired or that evidence provided was insufficient. These cases remain stalled. Fujimori and his associates, who continue to hold significant power in Peru, have denied all responsibility and argued that incidents of abuse within the program were isolated. To date, no one has been held responsible for the alleged crimes.

“These crimes have gone completely unpunished,” said Marina Navarro, executive director of Amnesty International in Peru. “Impunity is in itself a human rights violation, but it also means … there are no guarantees that it won’t happen again.”

In 2021, a judge opened an investigation into the role of Fujimori and the health ministers, only for the Supreme Court to reverse the decision last December, siding with Alejandro Aguinaga — one of the ministers questioned and a sitting congressman — who had argued that the statute of limitations had run out.

“What they’ve achieved with the annulment is to bide more time,” said Maria Ysabel Cedano, an attorney at Demus, a women’s rights group representing forced sterilization victims.

Before opening a new investigation into Fujimori and his associates, the attorney general’s office must now argue that the alleged crimes amount to serious human rights violations, which would allow an exception to the statute of limitations, said Navarro.

Under international law, mass forced sterilizations are considered crimes against humanity and are not subject to statutes of limitations, but in Peru, efforts to include forced sterilizations as a crime against humanity in the penal code have failed in the legislature, said Cedano.

Last August, for the first time, the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACHR) decided to review a forced sterilization case in Peru after concluding that the Peruvian state had shown “a lack of diligence.” Specifically, the IACHR found that, on several occasions, Peru’s domestic courts had archived the case of Celia Ramos, a 34-year-old who died of complications from a forced sterilization in 1997. It will determine whether the Peruvian state is responsible for the forced sterilization of Ramos that ultimately led to her death.

While the IAHCR cannot intervene in the Supreme Court’s decision, victims’ lawyers raised hopes that the international court will take into account such delays when it reaches a verdict.

“When the court makes a decision, it’ll have to analyze whether the state violated the right of access to justice,” said Cedano. “What we hope for is that it will take that into consideration when resolving the case by providing fair reparations for Ramos’ daughters and measures of non-repetition that will benefit all the victims.”

Questions remain, however, whether Peru will abide by a future IACHR ruling — which will be binding — after the Constitutional Tribunal flouted the IACHR’s order to keep Fujimori behind bars. The IACHR also expressed concern over the annulment of the forced sterilization proceedings and urged the state to adopt measures protecting victims’ right to justice, a recommendation with which the Peruvian government has yet to comply.

Such delays and hurdles within the justice system have discouraged victims from telling their truth. But Condori, who believes in the prospect of justice, said that some victims in her predominantly Indigenous community in southern Peru have only recently come forward and decided to testify before the attorney general’s office in the coming months.

As long as there’s still a chance at justice, Condori vowed to persevere in her pursuit.

“Justice has been denied to us for years, but we will continue in our struggle.”