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Peru defends Fujimori’s forced sterilisations at Inter-American Court [1]
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Date: 2025-06
There were 15 sterilisations planned for 3 July at the local health post, which had running water for only a few hours a day. Ramos was number 14. Number 15 was never carried out.
According to testimony from an assistant doctor and a stretcher bearer included in the original police investigation, the doctors performing the sterilisation had asked the nurses for more anaesthetic and oxygen, but were told there was none left. “And this was in front of Mrs Celia's desperate cries,” said CEJIL lawyer Gisela de León, reading the police report at the hearing.
The nurses were ordered to go to the pharmacy to buy supplies. Ramos was eventually given diazepam, a medication usually used to treat anxiety, seizures or muscle spasms, which caused her to have an allergic reaction and cardiorespiratory arrest. At 4pm, she was rushed to a private clinic an hour and a half away in Piura city. By the time she arrived, she had brain damage due to a lack of oxygen, according to the report of the doctor who received her.
Meanwhile, when Ramos did not return home from her sterilisation, some relatives went to the health post to ask about her. They were told that she had been rushed to the city after having a tumour removed. “My aunt arrived very shocked, with a bag they had given her containing a liquid and something that looked like a tumour,” her daughter recounted at the hearing. It was later confirmed that it belonged to someone else.
Ramos spent the next three weeks in a coma. She died on 24 July 1997.
No justice
Three days after Ramos died, her husband reported the doctors who operated on her for causing “serious injuries followed by death”. The public prosecutor's office closed the investigation in December 1997, describing the incident as “fortuitous”.
The state has spent the three decades since repeatedly opening and closing probes into both Ramos’s death and the cases of thousands of other victims. The most recent such investigation was launched in 2018, Stuardo Ralón, a commissioner from the IACHR, told the hearing. “The investigation still remains in the preliminary stage,” he said, “with no clarification of the facts or punishment of those responsible.”
In 2010, Ramos’s daughters reported their mother’s sterilisation and death and the state’s denial of justice to the IACHR, which monitors member states’ compliance with the American Convention on Human Rights but is not a court of justice. It found Peru responsible for violating the rights to life, integrity, judicial guarantees, equality before the law and judicial protection, as well as Ramos’s sexual and reproductive rights. The commission recommended the state provide reparations to her family, investigate and punish those responsible. In 2023, in light of the Peruvian authorities’ inaction, the IACHR referred the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Fujimori, who was imprisoned in 2009 for other crimes against humanity committed during his presidency, died free last year after the Constitutional Court ordered his release, upholding a presidential pardon granted to him back in 2017. A Peruvian law passed last August that prevents the prosecution of all war crimes and crimes against humanity committed before 2002 now looms as a new threat to the sterilisation trials.
‘Sterilise yourself and be happy’
The PNSRPF and its flagship component, voluntary surgical contraception (VSC), were launched in 1996, one year after Fujimori won re-election. At that point, he was already presiding over an authoritarian regime, having led a coup that dissolved Congress, intervened in the judiciary and all oversight bodies, and militarised the main media outlets in 1992.
Fujimori had blamed Congress for obstructing his policies, particularly the fight against the leftist guerrilla groups Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, a conflict that left nearly 70,000 dead and missing between 1980 and 2000, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Most of the victims were Quechua speakers.
As a result of the conflict, nearly 900,000 people were displaced between 1990 and 1995. Widespread poverty and a lack of healthcare meant that by 1996, Peru had the second-highest maternal mortality rate in South America and one of the highest in the world, at 265 deaths per 100,000 live births.
Under the guise of fighting poverty, in 1991, the Fujimori government set a goal of “reducing the natural population growth rate to no more than 2% per year by 1995” with an overall fertility rate that “should not exceed 3.3 children per woman”. Sterilisations were carried out throughout the decade, but skyrocketed in the first two years of the PNSRPF, from 1996 to 1998.
Giving her expert opinion to the court hearing last month, Kimberly Theidon, a medical anthropologist with a PhD from the University of California, linked the sterilisations to the logic of Peru's internal war. “From military doctors to soldiers standing guard at the doors of makeshift operating rooms, from military cots to surgical equipment, it was a combined operation that blurred the lines of war, deployed in a highly militarised context due to years of armed conflict,” she said.
As Peru was preparing for the widespread sterilisations, many world leaders were agreeing to place sexual and reproductive health within the framework of human rights, rather than demographic and birth control policies, while recognising the right of individuals, especially women, to decide on their fertility autonomously. This was a milestone of the UN population conference in Cairo in 1994, and was reinforced a year later at a conference in Beijing.
Feminist activists from CLADEM (Latin American Centre for the Defence of Women's Rights) first received reports of abuses by the PNSRPF in Huancabamba, a mountainous province in Piura, the department where Ramos lived, in November 1996, when they visited the area for different work. The following year, the first complaints were received by the Ombudsman's Office.
A CLADEM report published in 1999 and entitled “Nada personal” (Nothing personal) documented the early years of the PNSRPF, recording 243 cases of forced sterilisation in 19 of the country's 24 departments up to November 1998 and revealing that local authorities were being issued with incremental targets for VSC and quotas for the number of sterilisation patients needing to be recruited by each health centre.
The report also found that medical workers were being offered cash payments (of between $4 and $8, according to statements made at the hearing) for each woman “effectively recruited” for the sterilisations, and documented the pressure, incentives and threats that were used to get medical staff to increase the number of surgeries.
Some women were sterilised immediately after giving birth or while undergoing a caesarean section without having been informed beforehand. Others reported being taken away by force and threatened with themselves or their children being denied health care, or even being reported to the police. Sometimes, health workers made the woman's husband or partner sign a consent form without her knowledge.
“Gender stereotypes, colonial legacies, ethnic discrimination and macho norms were imposed, which considered that poor, indigenous, illiterate women were incapable and did not have the right to make decisions about their fertility,” Theidon told the court.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/peru-defends-forced-sterilisations-court-fujimori-women-1990s-celia-ramos-durand/
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