Former president Fujimori returns to prison

[Judi Lynn]

2019-09-14 HKT 12:33

Peru's former president Alberto Fujimori returned to prison Friday after being taken to the hospital last week with heart problems, his doctor said.

"After overcoming serious health problems that forced him to have prolonged hospitalization, today President @albertofujimori is returning to prison," Alejandro Aguinaga said on Twitter.

. . .

Aguinaga said it was Fujimori's third hospitalization "in the last 40 days".

Between his frequent hospital visits, Fujimori has been serving out a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses in a specially outfitted cell at a police base in Lima.

https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1480525-20190914.htm?spTabChangeable=0

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Alberto Fujimori can be tried for death squad killings in 1992: Peruvian court

Alberto Fujimori, recently pardoned, has been linked by prosectors to killings of 6 rural Peruvians
The Associated Press · Posted: Feb 19, 2018 11:15 PM ET | Last Updated: February 19, 2018

A court in Peru has determined that former Peruvian strongman Alberto Fujimori can be tried in connection with a 1992 massacre despite his recent pardon from a 25-year jail sentence.

The ruling Monday paves the way for Fujimori to stand trial again for crimes committed during his decade-long rule.

President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski pardoned Fujimori in December from a lengthy prison sentence for his role in the deaths of 25 Peruvians and sanctioning the use of military death squads.

The pardon sparked protests and drew condemnation from human rights groups.

The new case concerns a 1992 massacre in which six peasants were kidnapped, tortured and killed by a paramilitary group. Members of the group, known as Grupo Colina, said they received orders from superiors.

Fujimori was at the top of that chain of command.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/fujimori-court-ruling-1992-killings-1.4542618

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Older article:

Why Don’t We Talk About Peru’s Forced Sterilizations?
Under former President Fujimori, over 200,000 women were violated—one of the largest such projects since Nazi Germany. His party is still in power.
By JACQUELYN KOVARIK
October 8, 2018

Last week, Peru’s supreme court overturned the pardon of brutal Peruvian ex-President Alberto Fujimori, tossing the leader back to his 25-year prison sentence for human rights violations and corruption. Human rights groups, outraged when Fujimori was pardoned by former-President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski on Christmas Eve last year, reportedly as part of a backroom deal to save his doomed presidency, are understandably ecstatic. Yet as the reversal is welcomed by Amnesty International, and splashed across international headlines, one of Fujimori’s less-discussed and most appalling legacies is still missing from the conversation: the over 200,000 indigenous women who were forcibly sterilized under his regime.

María Mamérita Mestanza Chávez was 33 when Peruvian health officials began threatening her with jail if she did not submit to surgical sterilization, according to those presenting her case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1999. Mestanza was a low-income, illiterate indigenous woman, and when after numerous intimidating visits she finally agreed to tubal ligation, she wasn’t informed of the risks, nor was she examined for potential complications. Her husband contacted doctors shortly after the surgery, concerned that his wife wasn’t well, and was told it was simply the effects of the anaesthesia wearing off. Mestanza died at home nine days later.

Fujimori gained international support and USAID funding for the sterilizations by presenting them at the UN Beijing Conference on Women in 1995 as part of a progressive reproductive rights program—a classic case of ethnic cleansing masked in “development” rhetoric. The number of those sterilized under Fujimori’s so-called “family planning” program between 1996 and 2000 is estimated at 294,032 people, including 22,004 men, by Peru’s official human rights watchdog Defensoría del Pueblo. Other estimates are even higher.

Mestanza’s case ended with an $80,000 payment by the Peruvian state and a promise to “conduct administrative and criminal investigations.” The petitioners, in the words of the settlement document in 2003, made clear that this was only one example of a “systematic government policy to stress sterilization as a means for rapidly altering the reproductive behavior of the population, especially poor, Indian, and rural women.”

More:
https://newrepublic.com/article/151599/dont-talk-perus-forced-sterilizations