Peru reviews charges of forced sterilizations

Peru's attorney general has opened an investigation into the alleged string of forced sterilizations of women that took place during the 1990s when President Alberto Fujimori was in office.

Prosecutors have decided to review the charges after receiving a report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which concluded that the government used money from an international health organization to perform the procedures on some 300,000 women.

The allegations are not new, and were brought up this year by current President Ollanta Humala during debates with his contender Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the now-jailed former president.

The difference is that the IACHR is treating the cases as crimes against humanity. The Washington-based committee's findings center on the case of María Mamérita Mestanza Chávez, a 33-year-old woman who died in 1998 after she was submitted to a sterilization procedure in Encañada, Cajamarca province. According to testimony taken by the IACHR, health officials were threatened with fines and prison terms if they didn't operate on the mother, who already had seven children.

After the original complaint was dropped by the Peruvian courts, Mestanza's family took the case to the IACHR.

Supporters of the Fujimoris, including allied lawmakers, call the investigation "a witch hunt."