Peru’s indigenous women were forcibly sterilised – decades later they still seek justice
Florentina Loayza remembers the knock on the door.
It was 1998 and the young mother-of-one was at her home in the Peruvian highlands, caring for her nine-month-old baby.
Free food was available at a nearby health clinic, said the nurse standing outside, and transport had already been arranged.
Florentina stepped into the van full of other indigenous women from the Huancavelica region, and was driven away.
Once inside the clinic – a simple wooden hut – she heard the doors lock.
“They said we had to receive some medication before we could leave. The doctor said he was going to give me some shots,” Florentina recalls, now 45. “He put a drip in my arm and I fell unconscious. That is when they mutilated me.”
The 19-year-old woke up vomiting and disoriented, and saw cuts across her lower belly.
“I did not know what happened to me. The nurses said it was birth control and that it would only last five years. I realised it was permanent much later,” she says. “Since then, I have been living in hell.”
