National Population Program


The National Population Program, known as the National Program for Reproductive Health and Family Planning from 1996 to 1998, was a project conducted in Peru in through the 1990s to reduce population growth as a way of meeting international demographic standards. Plans for the "total extermination" of impoverished Peruvians through sterilization were included in Plan Verde, a covert military operation created to establish a neoliberal military junta. Compulsory sterilization, which is a method that forces individuals to partake in sterilization operations, was the main method employed by the Peruvian government to decrease population.
Compulsory sterilization in the case of Peru under President Alberto Fujimori was a program strictly intended to lower national population growth by decreasing the fertility rate among women. The program targeted Peru's impoverished, indigenous, and marginalized communities and therefore implied the government's intention to diminish the rural population in order to enhance future economic growth. Overall, more than 300,000 Peruvian women were forcibly sterilized in the 1990s during the program.

Background

Velasco government

In 1968, the military overthrew President Fernando Belaúnde Terry and remained in occupation of the government for an entire decade. Within this decade-long military regime under appointed President Juan Velasco Alvarado, the Peruvian government made significant leftist reforms and intended to give justice to the poor and outlined the first defined population program in Peru's history. President Velasco rejected the popular population control theories at the time, adopting a population program that was pronatalist and in line with teachings of the Catholic Church. Velasco also rejected population control efforts on grounds that they were imperialist activities being performed by the United States; the United States had been increasingly promoting population control in Latin America at the time.

National Population Policy Guidelines

Following the fall of the Velasco government, the Plan of Action of the 1974 World Population Conference organized by the United Nations motivated the Velasco's successor, Francisco Morales-Bermúdez, to undertake population control policy with the aim to benefit Peru, with the National Population Policy Guidelines of 1976, DS 625-76-SA. The new guidelines reversed the policy of the Velasco government; contraceptives were promoted and planned families were promoted while Malthusianist policies were adopted, arguing that population control was necessary for economic growth. In 1979, Morales Bermúdez government adopted a new national constitution and focused on regaining economic strength within the country.

Law on National Population Policy

Under this new constitution, population growth and families' rights to fertility were topics of political concern. As a result of this new focus, the Ministry of Health began to offer public services towards family planning in 1983. On 6 July 1985, the National Population Policy Law, DL No. 346, was passed. The population policy law, which continues to be in effect, intends to promote "a balanced relationship between population size, structure and distribution, and socio-economic development." The law also specifically catered to the enhancement and protection of the human rights of Peruvian citizens with its promise to ensure voluntary and informed consent in issues regarding contraception and health services. However, Peru's government was still in the midst of internal conflict. Due to a lack of political support, there was not enough funding for the programs needed to carry out the National Population Policy Law. As a result, implementation of the law remained hampered until the presidency of Alberto Fujimori.

Demographics

By 1992, Peru would be ranked as having the fifth highest population in the Latin American region with an estimated number of 22,767,543 inhabitants. The country is generally split into three geographic regions: the coastal region, the highlands, and the selva. As of 1990, the demographics for these areas were as follows: 53% of the nation's population in the coastal region, 36% percent in the highlands, and 11% in the rainforest. The issue of population growth in Peru is directly connected with the social, political and economic inequality within the country. The average number of childbirths for Peruvian women is higher than that of Latin America's general average and also higher than the average of women in the United States. As for the comparison of birth rates within the country, 1.7 is the average number of children per woman with a university or college education while the average is 6.2 children per woman for those who have little or no education. Women living in rural areas, mostly of indigenous descent, have the highest average birth rate at 7.1 children per woman.
In the Andean countryside, the maternal mortality ratio is "very high for the region" at 185 deaths per 100,000 live births. In addition, there are 66 abortions for every 100 live births, even though abortion is illegal in Peru and therefore is most likely conducted with high risk.

Projects

National Population Program (1987–1990)

Two years after the Law on National Population Policy was signed into law in July 1985, the National Population Program, or Programa Nacional de Población, was established in 1987 through a Presidential Population Commission of President Alan García. Due to the various crises occurring at the time, only some of the programs were able to be implemented. The García government agreed with the Catholic Church that abortions and sterilizations would be prohibited in Peru. The main strategy of the initial National Population Program under the García administration focused on the dispersal of contraceptives and minor family planning programs.

Plan Verde

The Peruvian armed forces grew frustrated with the inability of the García administration to handle the nation's crises and began to draft a plan to overthrow his government. According to Peruvian sociologist and political analyst Fernando Rospigliosi, Peru's business elites held relationships with the military planners, leaving an impression that a neoliberal economy must be adopted in Peru.
Between 1988 and 1989, a coup d'état was initially planned to oust President García. In October 1989, a group of the armed forces finalized plans to overthrow the García government with a volume of the plan titled Driving Peru into the XXI century. The goals were to establish Peru as a developed country through the turn of the twenty-first century by establishing a neoliberal economy with policies similar to Chile's or those proposed by Mario Vargas Llosa. This volume also details plans to sterilize impoverished citizens in what Rospigliosi described as "ideas frankly similar to the Nazis", with the military writing that "the general use of sterilization processes for culturally backward and economically impoverished groups is convenient", describing these groups as "unnecessary burdens" and that "given their incorrigible character and lack of resources... there is only their total extermination". The extermination of vulnerable Peruvians was described by planners as "an economic interest, it is an essential constant in the strategy of power and development of the state".
Plan Verde was later redeveloped to include Alberto Fujimori as the head of a "civil-military" government. Peruvian magazine Oiga reported that Fujimori was to be directed on accepting the military's plan at least twenty-four hours before his inauguration. Fujimori would go on to adopt many of the policies outlined in Plan Verde.

National Population Program (1991–1995)

Since his 1990 electoral campaign, Fujimori and the Catholic Church disapproved of each other, with the Fujimori completely disregarding the Church's views on sterilization as a mutilation of the body. In 1991, a new National Population Program was developed by the National Population Council. With the compliance of Fujimori, plans for a coup as designed in Plan Verde were prepared over a two-year period and finally executed during the 1992 Peruvian coup d'état, which ultimately established a civilian-military regime and began the institution of objectives presented in Plan Verde. The coup, however, resulted with USAID stopping its funding of population programs in Peru. In 1993, a National Report on Population and Development of the Fujimori government argued that the previous program was insufficient and promoted large expansions for the program.
Although Fujimori was a supporter of family planning in public, the new National Population Program and its specific goals and strategies seemingly counteracted the law's initial purpose of preserving individual human rights.

Goals

With the newly drafted version of the National Population Program under Fujimori, goals were specified in the context of demographics. The Peruvian Ministry of Health's program manager stated that impoverished indigenous women are "poor and producing more poor people. The President is aware that the government cannot fight poverty without reducing the poor people's fertility. Thus, demographic goals are a combination of the population's right to access family planning and the government's anti-poverty strategy." The program was targeted towards poor women who had "little or no formal education". Thus, the program intended to:
The National Population program called on both public and private sectors to assist in its strategic implementation. Furthermore, seven strategies were laid out as guidelines to reach the intended demographic goals:
  • reproductive health and family planning
  • communication and information dissemination
  • decentralization of population policy
  • education
  • production of research and statistics
  • advancement of women and youth
  • environmental protection