Peruvian prosecutors on Tuesday recalled methods of deception and abuse in a trial against former President Alberto Fujimori, during whose government thousands of poor and indigenous women were forcibly sterilized.
The trial takes place a month before the April 11 elections, in which Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko, runs for president for the third time and proposes a “heavy-handed” government similar to her father’s.
Prosecutor Pablo Espinoza alleged that between 1996 and 2000 numerous “health festivals” were organized in remote villages, including fireworks and brass bands to attract women and then sterilize them without informed consent through deception and coercion.
“Bringing bands and fireworks shows the state’s action to capture the majority of the population in order to have more patients and thereby achieve the stated goal,” said the prosecutor.
Espinoza indicated that Fujimori government policy also awards three travel tickets to health officials who collected the largest number of sterilizations and threatened to fire them if they fail to meet their targets.
The nurses, for their part, harassed poor, illiterate rural women with more than three children and in some cases suggested that if they were not sterilized, they would lose government benefits such as medical care or the supply of medicines and food.
“It was a set of restrictions that intimidated a low-income person,” the prosecutor said in a remote trial over the pandemic.
The surgeries, including general anesthesia, were at best performed in medical posts or generally in mobile tents set up near health festivals.
Several women have stated that after surgery and in deep pain, they were forced to go to their distant homes, sometimes eight hours on foot.
Some passed out on lonely trails, sometimes crossing a river, and “had to regain consciousness on their own” without the help of anyone.
The prosecution has accused Fujimori of his alleged brokered responsibility for the injuries followed by the deaths of five women and for the serious injuries of another 1,301 women sterilized against their will.
According to data from the prosecution, there were 273,684 interventions and 1,599 complications occurred.
Fujimori, 82, has not spoken. Neither is his daughter, current presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, who was the first lady during her father’s presidency (1990-2000).
The former president is serving a 25-year sentence for two massacres perpetrated by the military in his government (1990-2000). He has three other convictions, two of them for corruption.
The former president affirms in his defense that he should not be tried in the case of sterilizations, as this charge, when extradited from Chile in 2007, was not included in the group of crimes for which he was to be tried.
The former president is also facing another trial for the murder of six farmers during his tenure by a military death squad.