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