Liz Tasa

Kápar

Kápar, according to the Quechua language, means to castrate. It is a word that in the Peruvian Andes is applied to animals but not to people, because in the andean cosmovision the fertility, both on land and in women, is of utmost importance.
 
Even so, when Alberto Fujimori was president of Peru, between 1990 and 2000, the National Program of Reproductive Health and Family Planning was executed. The main goal of this program was to reduce poverty and it was aimed at rural women with high levels of poverty that were mostly peasants. According to the Ombudsman’s Office, 272 028 women were sterilized through this program, of which 2166 that were affected reported having been subjected, through deception or threats, to these methods of sterilization.

This was a systematized program in which the doctors complied with sterilization fees and made direct reports to the president. Given the urgency of reaching the goals, a high level of negligence was committed. Due to malpractice many have died and others have cancer of the uterus or strong infections in the womb that prevents them from working and producing the earth as before. «You can not die, you can not heal», are some of their testimonies.

These women coexist with strong physical and psychological traumas. Their husbands and community marginalize them because they have lost their reproductive faculties. Those are the reasons why my photographic project seeks to narrate visually, through analogies between the earth and the wounds, the physical and, above all, psychological consequences of the victims of forced sterilization.