Peru will ask Chile to expand the extradition process of former president Alberto Fujimori (1999-2000) so that he can be brought to justice in a criminal case over the thousands of forced sterilizations of women carried out between 1996 and 2000 , informed the Peruvian Judiciary.
This Saturday (11), judge Rafael Martínez decided to take Fujimori and several former ministers to court in this case. The Peruvian judiciary later informed that, at the request of the defense of the former president, it suspended the process because it was not part of the extradition agreement between Santiago and Lima, under which Fujimori returned to Peru in 2007.
The prosecutor in the case, Carmen Rosa Crisóstomo, said that the Public Ministry “will in due course present an expansion of the extradition request” to Chile.
Martínez had said last week that the trial in the mass sterilizations case can only proceed with the permission of the Chilean Supreme Court, which authorized the extradition 14 years ago.
Fujimori, 83, is serving a 25-year prison sentence after being convicted of corruption and human rights violations.
At the same hearing, held virtually, the magistrate also decided to open criminal proceedings against former ministers Eduardo Yong, Marino Costa, Alejandro Aguinaga and Ulises Jorge Aguilar
“They will be prosecuted for being the alleged perpetrators of the crime against life, body and health — serious injuries, followed by death in the context of a serious violation of human rights,” said the judge.
The criminal case of forced sterilizations has 1,317 plaintiffs and was opened in 2002, having been filed and reopened several times.
Among those accused is Alejandro Aguinaga, Fujimori’s own doctor, former health minister and now a congressman for the Popular Force, a political party led by Keiko Fujimori, daughter and political heir of the former president.
It is estimated that around 270,000 poor Peruvians, many of them indigenous people who do not speak Spanish, have undergone tubal ligation surgeries as part of the National Program for Reproductive Health and Family Planning, which Fujimori implemented in his last four years in power. .
Most of the victims were indigenous people from the interior. One of them said that in 1997, when she was 19 years old, she took her baby to an office to be vaccinated and had her tubes ligated.
The questioned program aimed to reduce the birth rate to spur economic development. In these surgeries, according to official data, 18 women died.
.
