This episode explores former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori's population control programs and how eugenic principles have led to the forceful sterilization of women belonging to various indigenous communities. What role do foreign governments and international donors play in the racialized politics of population control, and how have violations of women's bodily autonomy and reproductive rights come to light? Listen to hear what kind of civil society mobilization is ongoing in pursuit of reparations for the victims and survivors.
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Glossary
USAID
(19:20 or p.4 in the transcript)
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was developed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. He created the agency after signing an executive order to advance American interests abroad through development efforts and humanitarian aid. With the global economy still relatively fragile less than two decades after the end of World War II, it was essential for the U.S.'s own prosperity to promote growth in developing countries and to help nations maintain their independence and freedom.
USAID works in more than 100 developing countries spanning the globe in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Eurasia. The agency, which has field offices in the areas noted above, is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with organizational units that are called bureaus. Those working in each unit are responsible for programs and activities in a specific country.
The agency's mission and objectives remain the same today. USAID's mission is to boost democratic values across the world, helping nations become self-reliant as they progress in their own development. While promoting development and reducing poverty are among its aims, it also promotes democratic governance in recipient nations, and helps counteract the drivers of violence, instability, transnational crime, and other security threats. source
Truth Commission or Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(31:52 or p.7 in the transcript)
In 1980 the Shining Path, a Maoist opposition group, began an uprising against the Peruvian military dictatorship to protest pervasive social and economic inequalities. In 1982, the TúpacAmaru Revolutionary Movement began fighting against the military as well and also engaged in an internal conflict with the Shining Path. The war disproportionately affected the remote Ayacucho Region where forty percent of an estimated 70,000 deaths and disappearances occurred. Activity of the Shining Path significantly diminished after their leader Abimael Guzmán and other key members were captured in 1992. The government's engagement in the conflict ended after President Alberto Fujimori was forced from office in November 2000. In December 2000, the caretaker government of Valentin Paniagua approved the establishment of a truth commission, which was inaugurated on July 13, 2001, and began its work after President-elect Alejandro Toledo took office later that month.
Interim president Paniagua decided to establish the Commission with the approving vote of his Cabinet. Supreme Resolution from February 27, 2001 proposed the creation of a truth commission and established a working group to design its mandate. The commission was set up by a decree.Its mandate was to investigate assassinations, torture, disappearances, displacement, employment of terrorist methods and other violations attributable to the State, the Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement between May 1980 and November 2000 during the administrations of former Presidents Fernando Belaunde (1980 - 1985), Alan Garcia (1985 - 1990) and Alberto Fujimori (1990 - 2000).
The TRC was comprised of twelve Peruvian commissioners, ten men and two women, chaired by Salomón Lerner Febres. The President appointed the members of the commission with the approval of the Council of Ministers. The commission opened five regional offices to carry out its work. On August 28, 2003, the commission released its 8,000-page final report to then President Alejandro Toledo and to other members of the government. source
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to "Democracy in Question", the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. This is the third episode of season seven of "Democracy in Question". Today I examine the relationship of democracy and demography using the case of Peru. My guest is Alejandra Ballon Gutierrez, assistant professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, who's joining me from Lima. She's a social scientist, a visual artist, and a feminist activist, whose work is situated at the intersection of gender, human rights, race, and decolonial perspectives. Her doctoral dissertation in social anthropology in Paris focused on the history of a decade of forced sterilizations in Peru, a subject we will discuss today. We'll also talk about her work as coordinator of the Forced Sterilization Reparations Working Group which has been trying to get justice for women forcibly sterilized since 25 years and her work at the Institute in support of the Rural Women's Autonomous Movement. Alejandra also has a master's degree in Critical Curatorial Cyber Media Studies from the Geneva University of Art and Design. Her work spans a variety of artistic disciplines, installations, drawing, music, performance painting, and the new media.
I'll also discuss with her the use of experimental art forms to work on social problems of public health and of women's rights, for which she has received international recognition, for example, in the form of an award from the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development in Holland. The former Peruvian elected president Fujimori's self-coup that turned him into a dictator in 1992 was a tragedy for democracy that continues to cast its long shadow over Peru even today. The attempted coup by President Castillo in December 2022 was a farce. He failed to dissolve Congress in the wake of a third impeachment attempt or to install an emergency government and overhaul the judiciary. He was arrested by his own security as he got caught in a traffic jam on his way to the Mexican embassy where he would have probably sought asylum. Both former presidents are now lodged together in the same jail. Fujimori's legacy is safeguarded by his daughter, and it continues to divide the country even now. We'll talk about therefore the checkered career and the instability of democracy in Peru, as well as the Fujimori program by using gender and reproductive rights as our lens.
What is the relationship between the body politic and body politics? How are eugenic principles applied that led to the forceful sterilization of thousands of women belonging to various indigenous communities? What role did foreign governments and international donors play in this racialized politics of population control? How did these grave violations of women's bodily autonomy and reproductive rights come to light? And what kind of civil society mobilization is currently ongoing to demand compensation for the victims, some of whom even died due to these forced sterilization operations? Alejandra, welcome to the podcast and thank you so much for joining me from Lima today.
Alejandra Ballón Gutiérrez (AB): Good morning from Lima, Shalini. Thank you very much for the invitation. Very glad to talk about these not so very glad subjects.
SR: Alejandra, let's begin with the current state of democracy in Peru that you described to me as a parliamentary dictatorship, which sounds like a contradiction in terms. Protests have been sweeping your country since December ‘22 when President Castillo was removed from office by parliament for attempting a coup. Demonstrators have faced brutal repression and police violence that has injured and killed protesters but also bystanders. Interestingly, these seem to be leaderless protests that brought together a very diverse set of groups. Would it be fair to say that the current crisis reflects decades of exclusion of indigenous and rural communities from the economic social and political life of the country? And what efforts would you say are being undertaken to remedy the injustices that these communities continue to suffer?
AB: Yes, Shalini, I think it touches historical non-solved problems that are in the political, economic, and social spheres. I would go back a little bit just to say that in the four last years we've had six presidents. This parliamentary dictatorship is about a collusion between the executive and the legislature powers and now they have taken majority in the police, in the military, in the Supreme Court, of course, the Congress, the Constitutional Court, the public ministry, the Ombudsman, the Urban Transport Authority from Lima and Callao, the municipalities, the National Superintendency of Higher University Education, that's why we are calling this collusion, this majority of power in all these institutions.
They are after now the electoral power, the Jurado Nacional de Elecciones. So this we think is their final goal and they have already started a campaign to undertake this institution. Sowe are already talking about dictatorship in Peru. Some of these efforts to revert the situation could come from civil societies, expression in the streets of all this discontent because the survey polls have 90% of people against Congress now and very similar, more than 80% against Dina [Boluarte]. So, there is no representation, neither from the executive, neither from the legislature powers. Of course, the marches are appearing everywhere in Peru, mainly in the south of Peru but as there have been a lot of killings, 49 extrajudicial executions and more than 2,000 wounded, people are afraid to march and protest. People from the unions, from the workers’ communities gathered. They reunited and they did a pact, a very important pact. They haven't been agreeing since 1987, so this is something very historical, and they are protesting in a national march this 19 July.
SR: The question that arises here for me is, Castillo's election did bring considerable hope tobegin with, if I recall correctly. He is a teacher, he is a trade union leader who comes from a highland indigenous community himself, and it looked to us, at least from far away, that he had the support not only of indigenous peoples but also of urban liberals and leftists. So what went wrong?
AB: I think what went wrong, is that he wasn't prepared for government, he didn't have the experience, and as I told you before, the four last years have been very difficult. They have used impeachment…
Let me explain something else. Keiko Fujimori is the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, who is now in prison, sentenced 25 years for human right abuses during his government. So, Keiko Fujimori was the first lady at the time, in the 90s, now she has become the leader of the Fuerza Popular Party, leading the extreme right parties in Peru. And when I talk about acollusion between the executive and the legislature, I'm talking about parliamentary dictatorship led by Keiko Fujimori. These six presidents that we had in four years, thisturning of presidents started in 2016 when Keiko Fujimori was candidate to the presidency and lost.
Since then, she has not recognized that she's lost, she says that there's been fraud, very similar to Trump discourse. They have used also impeachment, right? In Peru, impeachment is in the constitution since 1839, but it meant at the time when they put it in the constitution, vacancy for moral incapacity, but moral incapacity at that time meant mental incapacity. They are manipulating the term and they are using it to produce impeachment of moral, like if you could be linked to corruption, just something that we can use to take you out of the government. So that's why we’ve had all these presidents in these four years because the Congress led by Keiko Fujimori, daughter of Alberto Fujimori, is using this formula. And that's why Castillo had to face three efforts of impeachment. The first impeachment of Castillo or intent of impeachment was, when he was in his fourth month of governing, so it was right away.
And all the Congress from the right-wing parties and conservative parties led by Keiko Fujimori were all using very hard media campaign to delegitimize Castillo's government since day zero. They were saying it was a fraud because it was not much difference between Keiko and Castillo.
SR: As you just mentioned, Peru has seen six presidents since 2016. So, what seems to be the new norm is political instability, political turmoil, and the country does seem to be polarized with Fujimori through his daughter now still having support because as you just mentioned, Castillo won, but with a very small margin of victory. Can you explain why Fujimori's policies or person or cult, what is it which still is able to garner so much support? Because it seems to me that political parties in Peru have become fragmented. Some have called them kleptocratic machines. A reversal of the Fujimori government's neoliberal policies seems very difficult to achieve, and compared to say Argentina, Peru seems to lag also far behind on issues like women's rights. So, what does the current presidency of Dina Boluarte who is a woman lawyer mean for women's rights, and for the kind of polarized society that Peru is currently, between supporters and equally strong critics of Fujimori's policies and person?
AB: From a feminist perspective or a gender perspective, we can clearly say that conservative parties or far right-wing parties are united by the backlash of women's reproductive and sexual rights. So having the first woman president from the left party but governing the agenda against women's rights, from the conservative party, and aligned with neoliberal policies and deregulation of economy, etc., for us, is a feminist nightmare. Under Fujimori government in the '90s, he created the first ministry of women. Using all the feminist discourse, he built the Ministry of Women, at the same time he was implementing extreme forced sterilization program, that sterilized indigenous women.
The left parties, as the one of Castillo and the one of the actual president now, Dina Boluarte, which is called Perú Libre are also promoting the conservative agenda on women's rights. Sothey are not separated even in left-right in this case.
SR: That's a really interesting point. Let's go back one step, Alejandra, and historicize the trajectory of the assault on women's rights, gender, and reproductive rights. So, let's talk about Fujimori's government's population control programs, the Project 2000, as it was called, and the policies which explicitly targeted primarily poor and indigenous women inrural areas, but also in the capital, in Lima. Now, these are communities who have continually suffered from ethnic discrimination, and you have spoken and written about these abuses against their bodily autonomy, calling them eugenic because they violate the reproductive rights of peasant and indigenous women, whom the government considered to be culturally backward. And therefore, the government sought to curtail their reproduction. So could you explain the politics of Project 2000, which as you say was totally in contradiction to the establishment of Ministry of Women, of emphasizing women's rights. Fujimori was at the Beijing United Nations Conference, expounding in public and especially in the international arena, women's rights. And at home, he was targeting particular groups, especially poor and indigenous groups, and their reproductive rights. What was also the role here of international donors who were cognizant of the kinds of programs he was putting in place?
AB: Well, to explain the traumatic project of population in Peru, I should go a little bit into the history of eugenics, very briefly because we don't have a lot of time. Eugenics as a theory, it was very rooted in European academy. So then when it was strongly criticized or banished from the academy because of the Nuremberg trials, they delegitimized eugenics as a theory. So all the academic programs that were studying eugenism and were supportive of eugenics in the world, most of them changed, but many didn't, they just changed the title of the programs. And they became demography. Under the demographic studies, there still are some of them supportive of eugenics. We are still in this verge of eugenics in the world under the label of population control policies.
In Latin America, forced sterilization of indigenous people in many different countries was very huge in the '80s when they were under the military power dictatorship around many places in Latin America. And in Peru, it came very late in the '90s when we already knew these policies were very harmful and we had a lot of discourses and as you just mentioned, Fujimori using, co-opting, the feminist discourse in Beijing, he was, of course, using this discourse in favor of women's right, but in the practice, he did harm to women, especially indigenous women.
In Peru, this applied policy is very clear to be eugenic because poverty and indigenous people are behind it. If you are talking about poverty in Peru, we're talking about the feminization of poverty because women are always poorer than men. And, of course, indigenous are poorer than the colonizers or the Metis. So if we are now talking about women and indigenous, which was the target of the program or at least, we are certain is that the result was more than 300,000 women and men [00:22:30] sterilized in the '90s, but women were 272,000. So it was more than 93%-98% of women who were sterilized.
SR: What support did this particular policy receive from international donors and especially the U.S. government? Was there foreign involvement or was there at least foreign governments and donors turning a blind eye to this?
AB: As you mentioned there was this project called Project 2000. This project was a bilateral agreement between Peru and United States government. From Peru, the representative was the Ministry of Health and from United States, it was USAID. The money came from USAID and from the National Population Fund and later from the Nippon Foundation, but there were mainly these development and population agencies, global agencies that implemented the program, gave the money and the consent to do this. They say, of course, that they didn't know that they were violations of human rights and that they just wanted to support women's rights programs and development. But the reality, as I already said, was the contrary. There were a lot of violations and the struggle for justice now is 25 years, so a quarter of a century.
The highest point of the program when it was the most dangerous and harmful, was during '95, '96, and '97. So in 1998 a commission sent by USAID to see what was the problem concluded that there were high violations of human rights and they took out the money and that's why you see the line of forced sterilization going to very high in 1995, '96, '97 and in 1998 it drops back down.
That's the relationship with the United States mainly, but with the World Bank and the monetary fund also. The vice president of the World Bank was interviewed and asked about the policies, why they support the implementation of these forced sterilization policies. The vice president said that they implemented policies around the world using this logic. The logic is, for example, Peru had debt. The World Bank couldn't lend money to countries that are in debt. So, this country says, but how am I going to get out of debt if you don't help me investing money here? The World Bank says, well you have to go down the line of poverty. One of these forms to get down the line of poverty in macroeconomics is to not have a lot of poor people, so that they don't enter into more poverty. So, you reduce the birth of people who are considered poor since they are born. If you implement a very high sterilization program, the macroeconomics will go up. They will say, you are not poor anymore as a country. Even though poverty is still the same, or even worse for the poor people.
SR: It's very much about reducing poverty or the illusion of reducing poverty by reducing the number of the poor. This is a logic we have seen in many, many parts of the world, especially in countries of the global south, where there have been targeted population control programs of the same kind, supported by international donors and carried out by national governments. Now, could you say something about the successful mobilization of indigenous women? You say they've been fighting for reparations since about 25 years for these forced sterilizations that they were subjected to and I still say successful mobilization because in many, many other countries of the world, women have not even dared to raise their voices to ask for compensation or reparations for the bodily harm done to them. And what strategies have you used as activists to mobilize these women? What strategies have been successful? Could you say something about your own role as an activist with the so-called Red CarpetProject in this context?
AB: The women victims, sometimes they call themselves victims and sometimes they call themselves survivors. They use both names and the women have been fighting since day one. Giulia Tamayo who was lawyer feminist who discovered that this was a systematic policy. Before her findings, women they were already accessing the press and telling everyone that they've been doing this. For them, it was very clear because there was no demand from rural women for these contraceptive permanent methods. There is just no demand, even until now. All their cosmogony, all their culture is based on family and children and even labor and working of the land is linked to the number of the family. All the program was in Spanish so they couldn't consent.
For many of them it was the first time they went to a hospital. For many women, it was a very traumatic experience, and they didn't go again to hospital even if their children weresick. They think hospitals are just a place where they do harm. So, they've been fighting even though it has cost them a lot because civil society and conservative parties always defendedFujimori program and also because the feminists at the time in the '90s didn't criticize the program. They supported Fujimori until he was already sentenced for human rights abuses. They even published pronouncements defending the program. It's a very paradoxical, contradictory history in feminism in Peru.
So indigenous women have been very resistant and very consistent also in proving this. Soone of the main actors in this was Hilaria Supa who was the first rural Congresswoman and she was the first Andean parliamentary also. So she was one of the first women in Congress and, of course, she's indigenous from Anta and from her community, she was not force-sterilized herself but in her community where she was born and where she was active many of the women were. So, when she reached Congress, she took the theme to the parliament,and it became wider and more an issue that concerned civil society as well. Since 2011, the feminist-rooted activism has taken the theme and put it on the social sphere and the civil society sphere. We started to do this Red Carpet Project which is mainly women but it's open to any gender. So, women, men, even dogs; sometimes family comes with dogs, and they dress the dogs in red and children also participate, and they all dress in red and they use their own body to form a red carpet made out of the human body, of the social body.
So and this red carpet is performed in the architectures of power meaning for example in the stairs of Palace of Justice, in the stairs of Congress, in the stairs of hospitals, in the stairs of all these places who are the architectures of power and who are behind or not caring about feminicide, trafficking in women, forced sterilization, forced maternity, sexual violation harassment, and all the forms of sex work, all of these forms of abuses that women are living in Peru now. So we use this form of mobilization that this year is now a decade of red carpet mobilization and, of course, one of the main subjects has been forced sterilization to support women, rural women that are very far from Lima, and to in solidarity protest in the name of forced sterilization but also many of the red carpet have been done by women, forced sterilization victims, not in a representative way but they themselves using their bodies when they have come to Lima or when the red carpet has been done, for example, in Ayacucho or in other regions in Peru.
SR: One question I had here was I read that in March 2021, President Fujimori and three of his former health ministers were charged with the forced sterilization of thousands of poor and indigenous women during his presidency. So, in addition to using these spectacular public actions like the Red Carpet obviously feminist groups and lawyers have been using also the courts. Could you say something about the experience of the use of courts and where are things now with these court cases?
AB: There are two aspects of this. One is they seek for penal justice so then there we have the trial now but there are two separated cases. And then there is the seek for reparations. So,let's start with the trial. The trial started in 2021 and they are in the part of research and investigation which we hope it's not going to be too long because there's a lot of research that has been done in these 25 years. Anyway, it is very difficult because of many things. First of all, few women have legal representation. And they don't have fluid communication with their lawyers or with the representatives.
So more than 8,000 women and men are now under the registry of the state which is the registry of victims of forced sterilization held by the Ministry of Justice. It's called REVIESFO. But this registry doesn't have legitimacy so that all the women and men who are in this registry can have access to reparation or that there's all these victims that are already registered and considered by the state that they are forced sterilized can enter the trial. Soyou see, there is a triple thing. There is the registry that the women and men have to undertake more than three times visit to the hospital, to bring the testimony and they have always to do it with a person who speaks Spanish and they have to leave their lands and go to the places.
The forced sterilization in Peru in the '90s was under the armed conflict. After the armed conflict there was the Truth Commission. The Truth Commission inform was published in 2003. This human rights commission gave us the dimension of the violence that happened in Peru, but they omitted the forced sterilization. They didn't consider forced sterilization linked to the armed conflict. They considered it to be something that was going on at the same time but nothing to do with the armed conflict.
Now, of course, we know that it has everything to do, and it was a key part of at least the autocratic government of Alberto Fujimori. It was written in the Green Plan. It was conceived first and conceptualized from the military elite. So, we know it was a strategy to control population. So, the thing is that after the inform of the Truth Commission the results which were very important for our history became linked to the PIR. PIR is the Plan for Integral Reparations and also from the PIR, you have the RUV. RUV is the Register of Unique Victim. So if you were someone who during the armed conflict were a victim, you were registered in the RUV and because you were registered in the RUV, you had access to the PIR.
So now we have the REVIESFO for forced sterilized women but the REVIESFO doesn'tenter the PIR, because they are still saying that this was something different, even though we already know we have much more evidence of everything. And there was a sentence last year in favor of the women so that they could be repaired and enter the PIR. And now there was an audience yesterday so that the Ministry of Justice could implement this because they have the sentence, but they don't implement it. So, they are still fighting for this reparationbut we can feel that reparation may be more close than the trial.
In the case of the trial as I told you there are two trials now but there is the main trial which we are seeking Alberto Fujimori to be a part of because when he was extradited from Chilethey didn't count the forced sterilization case. So even though he's accused as one of the main responsibles of forced sterilization program in Peru, he cannot yet be tried for it. We have towait for the Chilean government to approve that this case is under the extradition.
SR: Let me finally conclude with a larger question about human rights violations and abuses in Peru and the judicial reckoning with those because there are other very major human rights violations that your country must also confront and come to terms with. I'm thinking for example of the Shining Path and other revolutionary armed groups and state agents who killed and disappeared some 70,000 people during the armed conflict in the '80s and '90s so from 1980 to 2000 according to estimates by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru. The vast majority of those who were killed were also poor farmers and especially from indigenous communities. Surprisingly as of last year, there have only been some 50 convictions in some 92 cases which have been handed down by the courts and this is slow progress indeed. So the question is how would you situate these women's rights and their quest for justice especially in the legal arena against the background of this much larger problem of confronting human rights violations through the judicial process and also through in this particular case, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission because apparently that commission also didn't focus on forced sterilizations for some reason.
AB: There is something which is at least for me hard to understand. The thing is that there is a division or in Peru at least there was a very big division between human rights and women's rights. Not all of the human rights defenders were defending women's rights. So, for example, in Peru we have the inform of the Truth Commission in 2003. As I said, they didn't take the case of violations of human rights in rural women, they did a big effort to state all the different types of violations of women, but not forced sterilization which were mainly indigenous. Maybe it was because it was too huge, and then it would change the historical result because the main result of the Truth Commission is that there were a lot of violations committed during the armed conflict by the terrorist groups mainly and on the other hand by the state, But if you take into account forced sterilization as a crime of the state under the armed conflict period, of course, the state will be the first responsible and not the terrorist groups because it's more than 300,000 women and men. They don't want to change that history. They they see history in a different way and they don't want to consider this because they will have to change how we look at history and there's a lot of academies, a lot of people, human rights defenders and very good-will people who lawyers and human right lawyers and everyone who has been supporting the truth of the Truth Commission inform.
It is very difficult just to seek for justice when you're a victim of human rights but if you're a woman, of course, it's more difficult and if you are a rural woman, it's just almost impossible. So that's why when I think about forced sterilization in Peru, I do think of very large indigenous MeToo because when I was traveling around Peru in the Andes and in the Amazon and I was going to the north or to the south speaking with women and the stories were the same in very different parts of Peru and they were all you know saying this happened to me this way. Of course, there are variations depending on the region and how the culture of that specific place was being held but the main core of it was the same type of violation based on a lot of structural discrimination.
SR: Thank you very much, Alejandra, for this wide-ranging discussion about the ups and downs of democratic rule in Peru, especially the Eugenic Population Control program of the Fujimori government and the way in which it has targeted especially poor and indigenous women and their continuing quest for justice. So thank you for being on the podcast today.
AB: Thank you, Shalini, for all the reflections and for having this moment to think about all this.
SR: We heard Alejanda discuss what we would call democracy capture and she has called it a parliamentary dictatorship. That is a collusion of the legislature with the executive powers to concentrate all powers negating a separation of powers which should be the hallmark of a liberal democracy. The move to dictatorship in Peru is therefore quite visible despite an elected parliament still being in power because there is also a crisis of representation that underlies this problem given the fact that poor peasant communities especially indigenous communities have always been disadvantaged in terms of their access to not only the political system but also the economic and social systems.
Huge public protests are rocking the country since December last year and they have been met with violent state repression. Peru has seen six presidents within a short period of six years due to the use of impeachment as an instrument to destabilize government after government. We've also heard how conservative far right-wing parties which are fragmented otherwise have become united in their opposition to women's reproductive and sexual rights. Surprisingly they are joined in this anti-feminist politics by many of the left-wing parties as well.
President Fujimori was paradoxically implementing a countrywide forced sterilization program at the same time as he established the first ministry for women and espousing women's rights in the international arena. The population control program of his government supported by foreign donors, USAID in particular, was directed at poor peasants and indigenous women. It was a eugenic program as we heard, targeting groups which were considered by the government to be culturally backward. The Fujimuri government co-opted women's rights while discriminating against their bodily autonomy and violating it. It is as if in order to reduce poverty it decided to reduce simply the number of the poor.
The women who are victims or survivors rather of this eugenic politics have been campaigning for justice since the last 25 years. Indigenous women are not only demanding that justice be done in courts of law in that perpetrators like President Fujimori himself but also three of his health ministers should be prosecuted but they are also seeking reparations for the bodily harm that was done to them.
This was the third episode of season seven. Thank you very much for listening. Join us again for the next episode after a summer break of one month when I resume the podcast at the end of August. My guest will be Janka Oertel who is the China expert at the European Council of Foreign Relations in Berlin. We will discuss her new book, "End of the China Illusion", where she argues for a pragmatic European politics towards China which is challenging the world order with its bid for global power today.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed and, of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.