The Issue

In 1995, under the guise of driving down poverty, Peru’s then President Alberto Fujimori launched a reproductive health plan with a strong focus on ‘voluntary’ permanent  contraception methods. In practice, these surgical procedures were performed routinely on women without their informed consent and almost exclusively in poor rural indigenous communities. Often left with little to no aftercare, many of these women still suffer health complications and emotional trauma from these forced sterilizations.

It is estimated that roughly 272,000 women and 21,000 men were sterilized in Peru from 1996 until 2000, when Fujimori resigned from office. One of these cases was that of Mamerita Mestanza, who underwent a forced sterilization in 1996 and died at home nine days after the procedure. After years lingering in the Peruvian justice system, her case reached the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR), a regional body where unresolved and emblematic human rights cases from the Americas are heard.

In 2002, in the midst of a truth and reconciliation process that was investigating human rights violations from the 1980s and 1990s, the state of Peru finally recognized its international legal responsibility in the forced sterilization of Mestanza and thousands of other women. This enabled several legal proceedings at the national level, but these were repeatedly shelved for alleged lack of evidence. At the time of publication in November 2018, Peru has yet to adequately hear and offer redress to the women affected by forced sterilization and many believe that international attention is the only way to bring those responsible to justice.

The Organization

Chaka Studio produces documentary films and transmedia projects through an interdisciplinary approach to new media technology. Exploring how web multimedia and interactive storytelling online can be used offline, Chaka developed the Quipu Project to give women the opportunity to be heard and receive support as they continue their struggle for justice. The name is inspired by “Quipus”, which are knotted cords that were used by the indigenous Incas to convey complex messages. The Quipu Project’s staff are from Chile, Peru, Canada, Colombia and the United Kingdom.

The Interactive Documentary and Video

Interactive Documentary - The Quipu Project

The Quipu Project established an Ethics Advisory Board in 2014 to address issues of informed consent and safety and security. As the initiative evolved, the Quipu Project adjusted its policies on privacy and confidentiality. For example, when the pilot project was launched in 2013, the women often shared their names and locations. By 2015, the Quipu Project edited the names out of previous testimonies and participants were advised to record testimonies without names as a safety measure, given that contributors could face retaliation or be denied medical services in their community. There were also concerns for health professionals who could be targeted.

The Quipu Project has made several deliberate production choices that reflect the purpose of the project:

• To ensure technology was not a barrier to participation, the Quipu Project distributed simple mobile phones throughout villages and used radio advertisements to publicize the project, explaining that contributors can leave testimonies in their native Quechua rather than Spanish and that their testimonies would remain unaltered

• The Spanish and Quechua is subtitled in English, and not dubbed. Some advisors suggested voice-overs to avoid subtitles on audio on the website, but the Quipu team was committed to leave the original stories and voices, without the mediation of a researcher or translator

• As backdrop to the audio, the Quipu Project used moving images that reflected the women’s context (scenes of a village, for example) so that no individual face is identifiable. This was a deliberate choice in line with the project’s goal to build Peru’s collective memory of that era and show how this state policy created a widespread emblematic pattern of abuses, not isolated cases of medical misconduct

• Testimonies are continuously added to the website, so the interactive documentary is a ‘living’ project that continues to grow and evolve after its ‘release’ online. This open-ended structure reflected the non-linear nature of the production phases and how the issue of forced sterilization continues to be unresolved until justice is achieved

  Video Documentary - Quipu: Calls for Justice

  Video lends itself to character driven narrative, so the Quipu Project’s initial idea of a video documentary on the overall interactive documentary project followed two key contributors, Esperanza Huayama Aguirre and Teódula Pusma Carrión, who shared their story across Peru and mobilized other women to join the Quipu Project. To script and edit the video documentary, the Quipu Project worked with Bertha Foundation and The Guardian Documentaries over eight months with a budget of roughly $22,000. This number does not reflect the full cost of the production, given that the Quipu Project already had most of the footage. The Quipu Project took the lead on editing.