INTERVIEW WITH GIULIA TAMAYO

A crime that has been overlooked by Peruvian authorities when trying former president Alberto Fujimori for human rights violations is that of the forced sterilizations promoted and carried out during his second administration. More than 200,000 Peruvian women had their fallopian tubes tied not only through deception; many were also forced to do so under threat of not receiving the food aid offered by the Fujimori government. This case reached the Peruvian courts, and after passing through various stages it ended up at the Fiscalía Provincial de Delitos contra los Derechos Humanos, which ultimately decided to archive the case in May 2009. That decision was confirmed months later, in December of that same year, by the Fiscalía Superior de Derechos Humanos. Is it still viable for the thousands of Peruvian women who were victims of this abhorrent forced sterilization campaign sponsored by the Alberto Fujimori government to obtain justice? "Not only is it possible, but it is a pending obligation for which the Peruvian State must answer. It falls to the authorities to investigate, bring to justice, and sanction those responsible, guaranteeing victims' rights to an effective remedy and reparation," says Giulia Tamayo, a Peruvian lawyer who in 1997 began following the issue from the Comité de América Latina y el Caribe para la Defensa de los Derechos de las Mujeres (CLADEM). Tamayo is perhaps the jurist who knows the case best. She carried out meticulous testimony-collection work, gathered into a study that demonstrated with clear evidence the coercion to which the country's most vulnerable women were subjected—above all those living in the country's most remote communities, Quechua-speaking and peasant women. "Until now the numerous victims who have been denouncing the serious abuses carried out under the Family Planning Program during the Fujimori regime have suffered a second violation of their rights by being kept in prolonged injustice," says the lawyer, who, precisely because of her investigations, was the victim of harassment that forced her to leave Peru and settle in Spain. Tamayo now works as a gender specialist in the Spanish delegation of Amnesty International, and although time has passed, this topic continues to interest her, all the more so after the justice system's decision to archive the case—a decision she interprets as an "obscene display of contempt for victims of serious human rights abuses and of colossal ignorance of international law."