Florentina Loayza was 19, a baby of a few months and barely spoke Spanish when she was forcibly sterilized. Thirty years later, like thousands of other Peruvian women, she continues to demand justice.
In the 1990s, the country was in the grip of a violent internal conflict between the bloody far-left guerrillas and the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), who died in 2024 after spending 16 years in prison for human rights violations, before being pardoned.
At that time, across the country, poor and uneducated women, many of them indigenous Quechua, were forcibly sterilized.
In October 2024, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) denounced a "systemic" practice that had affected "300,000 women", considering that these acts could "constitute a crime against humanity". It urged Peru to compensate the victims and guarantee them psychological support.
The aim was to prevent "the poorest women from reproducing," Leticia Bonifaz, a member of Cedaw until 2024, told AFP. The case of these women represents the largest case of forced sterilizations ever documented in Latin America, she emphasizes.
– “Inside, we are wasting away” –
At 46, Florentina Loayza, her face closed under her hat, campaigns with determination for her cause. Recently, in front of the Ministry of Justice, she demanded, alongside a handful of other women, "full reparations."
In 1997, she lived in a rural community perched at 3,500 meters above sea level in the Huancavelica region of southeastern Peru.
One day, she was told that the state was distributing "provisions" at a health center. Without realizing what awaited her, she decided to go there. She was then "crammed like cattle" with other women into a truck.
There, "the nurses injected us with a serum. After that, I don't remember anything," she says. When she woke up, she was told that she would no longer be able to have children.
Her community and her partner do not believe that the operation was performed without her knowledge. She is told that she was sterilized "because she wanted to be with several men." The father of her child abandons her. She then migrates to Lima, where she survives by doing housework, despite the intense pain she says she still feels.
The government of Alberto Fujimori has always called these accusations "false." However, in 2023, the Peruvian justice system recognized that "involuntary sterilizations" were part of a "public policy."
It then ordered the State to compensate the victims and guarantee them access to health care, a decision which has not yet been respected.
To date, more than 7,000 women are on the state's register of victims. However, only 3,000 cases are under preliminary investigation, and no convictions have yet been handed down, according to the prosecution.
“They have destroyed my life,” laments Ms. Loayza. In addition to compensation, she would like the state to recognize her health problems. “From the outside, we look fine, but inside, we are wasting away,” she sobs.
– “I felt guilty” –
In the house she shares with her four children on the outskirts of Lima, Maria Elena Carbajal, 55, shows the only photo she has from her last pregnancy, before she was forcibly sterilized at the age of 26.
After giving birth at the public hospital, doctors told her that in order to see her newborn, she would have to undergo a "tubal ligation," accusing her of "having many children." Terrified, she agreed.
She was still in the hospital, holding her child, when she told her husband what she had just experienced. But he too refused to believe that the operation had been performed against his will: "I felt guilty about what had happened."
The young woman then found herself alone with her four children, and for years had to undergo treatment for a hormonal deficiency caused by sterilization.
Maria Esther Mogollon, a member of an association that brings together some 3,000 victims at the national level, deplores the "silence (...) of the State, which has never asked these women for forgiveness."
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