Ñusta Carranza Ko presents on Peru’s campaign of coercive sterilizations

On March 25, 2026, Ñusta Carranza Ko, Associate Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Baltimore, gave a book talk on her recently published monograph, Together We Fight: Surviving Peru’s Campaign of Coercive Sterilizations (University of California Press, 2026). The talk detailed her research methods, provided historical context, and addressed possibilities for justice.

To open the talk, Carranza Ko noted her identities as a South Korean and Peruvian (Quechua-speaking peoples of the Northern Andes) interdisciplinary scholar whose work has been shaped by Canadian and United States institutions. In addition to her background, her expertise in transitional justice, truth commissions, criminal accountability, and reparations has strongly influenced her approach to the topic of forced sterilization and the aftermath of Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980-2000). Additionally, the increased visibility of Indigenous activism surrounding forced sterilization led Carranza Ko to study the Programa de Salud Reproductiva y Planificación Familiar (National Reproductive Health and Family Planning, also referred to as PNSRPF), a policy that was in place from 1996-2000.

In Together We Fight, Carranza Ko relied on Indigenous methodology in order to share, rather than interpret, the stories of the women with whom she spoke. Storytelling was instrumental not only in her interactions with Indigenous victim-survivors, but also in speaking with the non-Indigenous interlocutors such as activists and medical professionals, whose stories were incorporated into the book to provide diverse perspectives on the topic.

Carranza Ko then provided historical context for the family planning program. Peru’s internal armed conflict preceded the development of PNSRPF. A majority of the violent conflict was between the state and the leftist groups Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path) and MRTA (Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement). The family planning program emerged during the conflict as a means for managing national instability. However, the late-1980s rhetoric surrounding family planning had roots in colonial, eugenic ideologies. Conversations about the modernization of Peru and social progress became the basis for the development of family planning as a discriminatory public health policy. The program specifically targeted Indigenous women from rural, impoverished areas.

Sharing media coverage of coercive sterilizations, Carranza Ko next outlined the state’s move from the discourse of family planning to a campaign of mass forced sterilizations. Some scholars estimate that between 270,000 and 290,000 people were sterilized. The discrepancy can be attributed to the roughly 20,000 men who were subjected to vasectomies. In addition to media coverage, there has been increased scholarly attention toward the topic of forced sterilization in anthropology and postcolonial studies. Carranza Ko referenced authors such as J.A. (Julieta) Chaparro Buitrago, who interprets PNSRPF as a form of colonial reproduction (2022), and Karla Mundim, who considers Indigenous women’s bodies as sites of extractivist violence (2025). However, few have considered the campaign in the context of genocide despite victim-survivors having openly addressed it as such. Carranza Ko pointed to the difficulty of proving genocidal crimes as a possible reason for the public resistance to naming forced sterilization as a genocidal act.

Carranza Ko referenced section D of Article II of the Genocide Convention (Feb. 24, 1960), which includes the imposition of measures to prevent births within a group, to argue that the campaign does indeed qualify coercive sterilizations as acts of genocide. She shared quotes from interviewees that explicitly address campaign policies that caused bodily harm and prevented future births. In addition to victim-survivors’ testimonies, the public prosecutor’s office has since found that Fujimori’s government attempted to sterilize 150,000 people in 1997 alone. To further support her position, Carranza Ko showed a map of the language distribution in Peru and discussed the location of health festivals coinciding with large Indigenous populations such as Cusco, Ucayali, and Ayacucho. These were locations also targeted during the internal armed conflict.

Despite repeated periods of violence, Indigenous women were and are not passive victims. Through the work of activists and NGOs, criminal investigations have been reopened and cases have been added as recently as November 2025. Just weeks before the talk, the daughters of Celia Ramos, a woman who died in 1997 after complications from surgical sterilization, in collaboration with the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) and DEMUS (Study for the Defense of Women’s Rights), brought Ramos’s case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

To close, Carranza Ko proposed that legal definitions of justice were insufficient for true justice. In seeking collective forms of justice, Indigenous women have challenged the limits of legal frameworks and complicated legal definitions of reparations. If individual harm is understood as impacting the victim-survivors’ broader community, then collective justice becomes a necessary part of reparations. Therefore, Carranza Ko remarked, Indigenous women have prioritized reparative justice for the collective over retributive justice for individuals.

An engaging Q&A followed the talk and included questions from attendees about intergenerational harm, the scale of the family planning program, the study’s methodology, and the broader impact of victim-survivors’ testimonies. Carranza Ko offered thorough responses to questions that covered a range of topics, but with particular attention to reparations. She noted the intergenerational harm experienced by survivors and their relatives, as in the case of Celia Ramos. Intergenerational harm has been publicly acknowledged through the Inter-American Court, whose decision included reparations for families of victims, and the Peruvian government, which has provided reparations for children’s education during the internal armed conflict. However, in other instances state obligations to provide reparations have yet to be fulfilled.