Lima, Peru – Maria Elena Carbajal still vividly recalls the doctor’s chilling response when, from her hospital bed, she asked repeatedly to see her newborn son, Francisco. “Once you have the procedure, you can see him,” the mother of four said the doctor told her, before asking: “You’re thinking of having more kids, like guinea pigs?”
It was September 18, 1996, at Maria Auxiliadora Hospital in the Peruvian capital, Lima – and Carbajal, then 26, had given birth around 4am. Within three hours, she had been sterilised.
Now a quarter of a century later, she is one of thousands of Peruvian women hoping to finally receive justice for one of the most notorious cases of mass forced sterilisations in history.
The regime of Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori sterilized 272,028 people between 1996 and 2001, the majority of them Indigenous women from poor, rural areas – and some without consent.
Now, in public hearings that began earlier this year, thousands of these women are demanding justice for what they say were forced sterilization procedures called tubal ligations.
Sterilization was a covert part of Fujimori’s “family planning” policy, which purported to give women “the tools necessary [for them] to make decisions about their lives.” But in fact, as revealed in government documents published by the Peru human rights ombudsman’s office in 2002, the regime saw controlling birth rates as a way to fight “resource depletion” and “economic downturn.”