FEWER PEOPLE: Peru resorting to sterilization?

For many poor women in Peru, a large-scale sterilization program is not a thing of the past.

Fernando Carbone, Peru's health minister, said this summer that as many as 200,000 women may have been forced or bribed into having sterilizations from 1996 to 2000.

Most of the victims were members of the Quechua and Aymara tribes from remote areas in the Andes.

Christina Ewig, who researched public-health issues in Peru last summer, said that the politics of the sterilization scandal has many layers. Ewig just received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is now teaching at the University of Wisconsin.

"There is evidence of some coercion or at least uninformed consent prior to sterilizations. I highly doubt that the numbers are anything near what the current government claims," she said.

What is clear is that former president Alberto Fujimori and members of the Peruvian military wanted to slow population growth by using sterilization and that some health-care workers had quotas to fill, she said.

"It was very important to Fujimori himself - there were indeed goals for numbers of sterilizations - that's been documented," Ewig said.

While there were abuses in the sterilization program, Ewig thinks that Carbone exaggerated the number to discredit birth-control programs because of his conservative religious beliefs.

An official investigation into the sterilization program by the Peruvian Congress concluded that there were "massive, compulsory and violent violations of fundamental human rights," and suggested that Fujimori, who is living in exile, might be guilty of genocide under international law.