Social Documentary Film: New platforms for justice, symbolic reparations and victim empowerment. Forced sterilizations in Huancabamba, Perú

• In Event: El conflicto armado de Perú. Memoria, verdad y justicia

Abstract

During 1995 the Peruvian government took the drastic decision to reduce the rate of natural population growth to a level no greater than 25 per annum and put in place a series of campaigns to promote it (VSC.) Groups of men and women of reproductive capacity, especially those living in the poorest areas of the Andean Highlands and the Amazonian lowlands of Peru, were sterilized for contraceptive purposes. These sterilization campaigns led of thousands of complaints.
My ethnographic research case study follows the different experiences in rural and urban areas to look at how memory has been constructed through the years, and how race and class intersected with these sterilization campaigns
The paper examines how Documentary film has been use as a tool in the search for justice and for symbolic reparation that can also work to empower victims. A Futile Voice” is a documentary Film that I began producing in 2012 during this investigation. During the years going back to the community with my findings it has provided me with evidence of how memory has been created by incorporating these events into a hegemonic racist social discourse that allows them to disregard the rights of the populations affected by these policies.

Author

• Inés América Ruiz Alvarado