Free Choice or Poverty Alleviation? Population Politics in Peru under Alberto Fujimori

La traducción de este artículo aparece en nuestra Hemerteca con el título: ¿LIBRE OPCIÓN O ALIVIO DE LA POBREZA? POLÍTICAS DE POBLACIÓN EN EL PERÚ DE ALBERTO FUJIMORI In 1995, the Peruvian government of Alberto Fujimori implemented a nation-wide ‘family planning’ promotion programme as a result of which, it was later revealed, poor, mainly rural and indigenous women were sterilized according to a quota system. Many were coerced, and some women died of unattended complications. These events have been investigated from a human rights perspective (CLADEM and Tamayo 1999, CLADEM 1998, Defensoría del Pueblo n.d.). This paper intends to widen the perspective by examining how it was possible that such neo- Malthusian-motivated politics were implemented in the second half of the 1990s, after the agreements reached at the Cairo Conference on Population and Development (1994) and the Beijing Conference on Women (1995) with regard to sexual and reproductive rights. Birth control programmes directed at the poorest of the world are not new or unique to Peru. As a wide range of studies demonstrate, the poverty of – often – non-white masses has prompted the development of active population control strategies by national and international organizations and governments (Mamdani 1972, Jaquette and Staudt 1988, Kabeer 1992). Such politics have been justified with economic developmental, environmentalist, and medical arguments. Often, as the diverse studies indicate, underlying motives for these strategies were based on fears for poverty and racial degeneration with effects beyond national borders. At a national level, the idea that populations could be ‘moulded’ into desired