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Various groups that fight for women's rights called for a demonstration Monday to take place Tuesday in the Peruvian capital Lima in front of the attorney general's office in order to pressure authorities to produce results in the investigation into more than 2,000 cases of forced sterilizations.
As presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the dictator Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), is leading the electoral polls, and human rights activists claim the investigation could be stalled, suggesting she is complicit in the forced sterilizations.
Human rights activist Gisela Ortiz said Keiko had a moral and political responsibility for the “criminal” sterilizations because she failed to condemn them when serving as the country's first lady, a position she filled from 1994 to 2000 after her parents divorced.
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Keiko recently stated that she supported the victims, although she suggested the possibility that the sterilizations never took place. "Victims of sterilizations, if there were any, will receive compensations," she said.
She also denied the sterilizations were part of a policy implemented by her father and suggested that doctors could have been the true culprits—a claim immediately denied by the country's medical association.
According to official statistics, over 270,000 women—most of them indigenous living in poor and rural areas—were forcefully sterilized between 1996 and 2000.
Alberto Fujimori, who has been in jail since 2007 for corruption and human rights abuses, has always claimed that the women were voluntarily sterilized.
However, according to human rights groups and the testimonies they gathered, the program was implemented nationally. In some cases, sterilizations were carried out with the authorization of relatives and not the victims themselves.
In other cases, women were operated on secretly without their consent after giving birth. According to reports by human rights groups, the government handed down quotas for sterilizing women and medical staff were forced to comply with the official instructions.
Human rights organizations have appealed a ruling issued in January 2014 that concluded there was not enough evidence to continue investigating Fujimori’s role in the sterilization campaign. In May 2015, judicial authorities granted a request to reopen the case.
Keiko has lead polls for several months. She is far ahead of the rest of the candidates with about 30 percent of voters' preferences.
WATCH: 18 Years Awaiting Justice in Peru for Forced Sterilizations
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