Unwittingly agreed: Fujimori, neoliberal governmentality, and the inclusive exclusion of Indigenous women

ABSTRACT

In 1996, Alberto Fujimori introduced the National Program for Reproductive Health and Family Planning 1996–2000, the first publicly funded family planning program in Peru’s history, under which at least 10,000 Indigenous women were forcibly sterilized. This program was aided by what I came to identify as the Reproductive and Sexual Rights (RSR) assemblage – a group of feminists working in reproductive and sexual rights in Peru. This was made possible by Fujimori’s co-optation of the reproductive rights discourse and the rise of neoliberal governmentality, which enlisted the expertise of non-state actors in projects of governance. Moreover, in their heartfelt desire to bring reproductive rights to Peru, the RSR did not appreciate Indigenous women’s inclusive exclusion from citizenship – their inclusion in the settler colonial nation as marginal members whose bodies could be instrumentalized for national projects. Through the National Program, Fujimori instrumentalized Indigenous women’s bodies to create statistics showing a reduction in poverty for international lenders. A similar reading of the RSR’s actions is possible. By downplaying the magnitude of the forced sterilizations in the late 1990s, the RSR unwittingly contributed to the violation of Indigenous women’s rights in the name of extending reproductive rights to ‘all Peruvian women.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• forced sterilization
• indigenous women
• neoliberal governance
• Peru
• settler colonialism

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank the twenty-two feminist and women’s rights workers I interviewed in 2015, whose work and dedication inspire me. I would also like to acknowledge the kind support of Florence Babb, Cristina Alcalde, Amy Cox Hall, Ella Schmidt, Karla Slocum, Christine Asmar, Kathleen DuVal, Hannah Palmer, and Erica Schoon, who all thoughtfully reviewed and gave brilliant suggestions to improve this article. The Graduate School of the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, and the Anthropology Department, Institute for the Study of the Americas, and Royster Society of Fellows at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provided financial support for this research and article write-up.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A procedure in which the fallopian tubes are severed, rendering the patient sterile.

2. In their arguments, they cite the 6,196 women who have officially registered in the government-sponsored Registry of Victims of Forced Sterilization (REVIESFO 2016-2018) and the 1,300 women who are part of a criminal suit against Fujimori and his ex-ministers of health (DEMUS 2019). They also cite statistical analyses in which researchers estimate that 211,000 women did not receive full information about the procedure during the process of informed consent, and 25,000 who were not informed that the procedure was irreversible (Rendon 2019). According to these analyses, the state did not properly follow informed consent procedures and, thus, forcibly sterilized women.

3. A steady stream of investigations by human rights lawyers, journalists, and independent scholars has corroborated affected women’s accounts of entrapment, coercion, deception, and kidnapping by health workers during the sterilization campaign (Ballón 2014; Boesten 2007; Chamorro and Meza 2015; CLADEM (Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean for the Defense of Women’s Rights) 1999; Ramírez and Sara 2014; Ríos and María 2015; Hiperactiva Producciones 2014).

4. Please see the work of advocacy organizations such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations) and the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center, as well as the advocacy and scholarship of Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri (Choctaw-Cherokee), Marie Sanchez (Cheyenne tribal judge), Vicenti Carpio (Jicarilla Apache-Laguna and Isleta Pueblo) (Carpio and Myla 2004), Smith (Smith 2015[2005]), Lawrence (2000), Ralstin-Lewis (Marie 2005), Kluchin (2009), and Theobald (2019), among others, in the U.S. In Peru, see (Ballón 2014, 2015; Ballón, Padrós, and Loayza 2019; Boesten 2007; Cuentas Ramírez 2016; Ewig 2006; Villalobos and Marieliv 2019; Getgen 2009; Guerra-Reyes 2019; Irons 2018; Muñoz Padrós et al. 2020; Rousseau 2007; Stavig 2017; Supa Huamán 2008; Yon 2005).

5. See for instance (Corntassel 2008; Coulthard 2014; Grey 2014; Holder and Corntassel 2002; Kuokkanen 2019; Lauderdale 2008; Sumida Huamán and Naranjo 2019).

6. All names have been changed to protect interviewees’ identities.

7. I presented this work to a roundtable of fifteen feminists from DEMUS and Manuela Ramos, two Lima-based NGOs, in October 2019. One person interviewed for this work was present at the roundtable. For all others, it was the first time they were introduced to my work. Given the critical nature of the work, I was pleasantly surprised when the feminists present felt I had treated them and the issue at hand with respect. They asked me to push harder on the issue of racism within the feminist movement, while at the same time advising me to complicate my reading of the RSR and Miriam’s interview. Taking their suggestions into account, I have worked to refine my argument. Nevertheless, the representations present in this work, along with any inaccuracies, are fully my own.

8. Post-coup, the Fujimori administration created the Ministry of Women and Human Development (PROMUDEH) and the Agency of Gender (both of which were the first of their kind on the South American continent), established quotas for the number of women in Congress (30%), created the Women’s Commission in the National Congress, established the Special Defender of Women’s Office within the Legal Ombudsperson’s Office (Barrig 2002; Vargas 2006), and passed the first laws denouncing domestic violence.

9. It is worth noting that women’s rights in Peru have, ironically, seen the most advancement during dictatorships. Women won the right to vote in 1955 under the conservative military dictatorship of Manuel Arturo Odría Amoretti (though Indigenous peoples would only gain this right in 1979 when literacy requirements were lifted) (Paredes 2008). Women also gained rights under the Leftist military dictatorship of General Juan Velasco Alvarado and his ‘Plan Inca,’ which sought to equalize rights and obligations between Peruvian men and women (Rodrígues and de Salonen 1978).

10. Malthusian logics dominated global family planning from the post-World War II period until the 1990s. Dozens of population control programs were carried out under the guise of family planning (particularly in the Global South, though not exclusively). See Hartmann (1995) and the 1974 Kissinger Report for further discussion.

11. Historically, use of the term ‘rural’ has denoted Indigenous, while ‘urban’ has denoted white, mestizo, and Indigenous urban migrants.

12. Investigations into the forced sterilizations, however, found that many of the places where forced sterilizations took place were not overpopulated, but rather had been decimated in the internal armed conflict (Boesten 2007).

13. See, for instance, the 1994 leaflet, ‘Women Watching the ICPD: strategies suggested by the Women’s Caucus Post Cairo Task Force’; (Petchesky 1995).

14. Rurality, poverty, proximity to the land (soil that becomes ‘dirt’ in the urban imaginary), use of Indigenous dress, and lack of formal Spanish education all mark indigeneity; urbanity, upward mobility, cleanliness, and literacy mark proximity to whiteness and modernity (Orlove 1998).

15. The War of the Pacific (1879-1883), for example, found Peru in desperate need of soldiers and ‘[i]n the midst of war [overlords] were quick to mobilize the Indians under the banner of patriotism and citizenship only to denigrate them later as [unpatriotic] “bandits” once the war was lost’ (Larson 2004, 56). In a pattern all too familiar to Indigenous, their material instrumentalization was quickly followed by symbolic scapegoating that allowed the nation to save face.

16. At the same time, USAID provided twenty tons of foodstuffs to the Peruvian government to offer to persons considering sterilization, complicating the narrative that USAID did not know that Fujimori had turned to Malthusian population control (Boesten 2007). USAID pulled funding for the program in 1998.

17. Even before the program had begun, the conservative sectors of the Peruvian Catholic Church and their allies in Congress were accusing the National Program of being ‘genocidal’ because of its planned distribution of birth control (Ewig 2006). As some of the first denouncements of forced sterilization came to Lima via rural parish priests – often the only institutional presence in rural areas – some feminists dismissed the first denouncements as conservative ploys to end reproductive rights.

18. The very same month, thirteen feminist organizations sent an open letter to President Fujimori denouncing the forced sterilization. At least two of these organizations also had members on the Mesa Tripartita, showing the complexity of responses and positions within the feminist movement and even within organizations (Carta Abierta a Fujimori 1998).

19. While some Peruvian feminist human rights lawyers, namely Giulia Tamayo, denounced the forced sterilizations as genocide as it became clear that these were the result of a government-sponsored program, the vast majority of the feminist movement was loath to denounce the sterilizations as such. As Ewig (2006), Boesten (2007), Getgen (2009) and Ballón (2014) have all noted, this was partly in response to the Catholic Church’s own denouncement of the program as genocide before its inception. In the Church’s view, proffering contraceptives was tantamount to genocide. Thus, when the Program turned out to be genocidal under the law, many Peruvian feminists were still loath to call the forced sterilizations genocide for fear of ‘sounding like’ the Catholic Church, according to interviews.

20. In 2009, 33 people, including 23 police officers, died in a confrontation between Native Amazonian peoples, Peruvian police, the DINOES (National Special Operatives), and the Peruvian Armed Forces.

21. This call to be good citizens, even where rights are withheld, has been repeated throughout Peru’s Republican era, including in current ecoterritorial conflicts, such as Las Bambas, in which Indigenous peoples fight to protect the land from mining pollution. Their resistance is framed as anti-Peruvian, as their resistance is seen to hold the country back from economic development.

22. Indigenous women still have the knowledge and means to cuidarse (literally, ‘take care of themselves,’ as in inhibit pregnancy) through use of traditional herbal medicine, though it was the case that many women did want access to modern contraceptives (Boesten 2007). Moreover, cuts to the body (like those necessary for tubal ligation) are understood as inherently power-robbing in the Andean Indigenous worldview (Interview 2; Volscho 2010).

23. Ex-congress person of the Republic of Peru (2006-2011) and ex-Andean Parliamentarian (2011-2016) Hilaria Supa Huamán said in interviews that she urged Fujimori and Peruvian feminists present at the 1995 Beijing Conference to do background research on rural lifeways and culture before implementing a family planning program. No such studies were conducted by the government.

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Lucía Isabel Stavig

Lucía Isabel Stavig is a Peruvian-American doctoral candidate in Anthropology, a P.E.O Scholar, and Royster Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds a Master’s in Anthropology from the University of Lethbridge, Canada (2017), a Master’s in Justice and Social Inquiry from Arizona State University (2013), and a Bachelor of Arts from New College of Florida (2010). Her current work focuses on Mosoq Pakari Sumaq Kawsay, a healing center outside of Cusco, Peru dedicated to helping Indigenous women heal from illnesses related to their forced sterilization in the 1990s. Lucía's work more broadly addresses the relationship between land, body, memory, and health in Indigenous communities in Abya Yala and Turtle Island.