Ricardina Huaman Folopa carefully pinches and counts wool threads with her fingers: 87 – the exact number of pairs of threads needed to weave a chumpi, a belt traditionally made by women in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Here, in the Indigenous community of Huayllacocha, south of Machu Picchu, she is part of a quiet revolution taking place.
Ricardina Huaman Folopa didn’t weave for 27 years after her forced sterilisation, as it was too painful for her
Folopa and eight other survivors of forced sterilisation are weaving again for the first time in decades, as part of a workshop led by artist and anthropologist Alejandra Ballón Gutiérrez. They are using the millennia-old backstrap loom they abandoned after their operations. “Can you believe it? It’s the first time I have woven in 27 years,” says Folopa. “It hurts my tummy, but that is not what worries me. What if I’ve forgotten everything?” she adds in Quechua, shifting to find a more comfortable position on the ground.
Using the loom, which is attached to the weaver’s waist, causes regular jolts to the abdomen as the ja’ulla, a wooden rod, is forcefully pulled towards them. After being forcibly sterilised, many women found it too painful. “I used to weave with my mother, who would bring me wool to make coats in the winter. But after the operation, the pain was unbearable,” says Eutropia Quilla Huaman, one of the other women at the workshop. “Our tradition is disappearing. It’s not just that the women stop weaving, they also forget the techniques, and that’s the worst.”
A workshop held in the garden of a healing house set up in Huayllacocha by Hilaria Supa Huamán, who was Peru’s first Indigenous congresswoman
In 1997, neither Folopa nor Huaman knew what an anaesthetic or a tubal ligation was. Between 1996 and 2001, medical teams travelled across Peru, targeting the country’s most vulnerable and poorest communities. The official purpose of the coercive birth control policy led by former president Alberto Fujimori was to fight poverty; it was originally funded by USAid and the UN. Rapid denunciations by community leaders didn’t stop the government from pursuing the policy, using quantified targets, according to Amnesty International.
In December 2023, Fujimori was released on health grounds from prison, where he was serving a 25-year sentence for crimes against humanity. He was never tried for forced sterilisations, however. In August 2024, a court confirmed the annulment of a case against Fujimori, dashing the hopes of survivors who had waited years for a trial. On 11 September 2024, Fujimori died aged 86.
‘I was so scared’: Folopa recounts her ordeal to the weaving group
Folopa is emotional as she remembers the nurses forcing her into a car, the bumpy road to Cusco, the doctors’ white coats and the other women at the Antonio Lorena hospital that night in 1997. She was 31 years old. “They were lying in a room as if they were dead. I was so scared. They didn’t make me sign any document, they left me unconscious in a room after the surgery and I had to go back home alone,” she says.
More than 270,000 women were sterilised in regional hospitals or small rural centres called postas. Many suffered botched operations conducted by poorly trained staff in unsanitary conditions, and suffered post-operative complications. Others, such as Juana Rosa Ochoa Chira, 27, died, in her case of peritonitis when the surgeons punctured her colon during a tubal ligation.
The workshop participants listen attentively to Folopa’s story. The 58-year-old farmer tells how the nurses compared her to a pig when they discovered she had six children. They can all relate to the trauma silenced by years of shame and guilt.
Artist and anthropologist Alejandra Ballón Gutiérrez, who runs the weaving workshops
Ballón Gutiérrez, associate professor of art at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, which is funding the workshop, says: “It is not just that these women have been sterilised and the damage is done. It is not a one-off. This violence is multiplied over time because it lies at the intersection of a series of injustices resulting from this policy.”
Survivors were beaten or abandoned by husbands convinced their wives had been sterilised to cheat on them. Ikumi, meaning women without children in Quechua, sometimes suffered marginalisation in their home towns. And although Fujimori’s government promised a better life and economic opportunities participants insist they have been left poorer and more vulnerable than ever.
Ballón Gutiérrez discovered the gradual disappearance of backstrap weaving during field work in Piura in 2012. The region in the north of the country is home to various Indigenous communities that have maintained the traditions of their pre-Columbian ancestors. In Huancabamba, 70% of the sterilised women interviewed by Ballón Gutiérrez were “culturally affected in the production and transmission of their ancestral traditions”; 57% stopped weaving altogether after being sterilised. “There have been massive cultural repercussions throughout the country, especially in the arts that require a lot of physical strength or shocks to the abdomen,” she says.
A participant pinches the wool threads to create designs on her chumpi
Ballón Gutiérrez ran a pilot project in 2022 in a healing house in Huayllacocha, founded in 2003 by Hilaria Supa Huamán, Peru’s first Indigenous congresswoman, to give victims of forced sterilisation a safe space to gather. A second workshop was held this summer.
Master weavers from the region of Pisac, a village in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, helped the women create a chumpi in three parts, representing three crucial moments in their lives: before, during and after the surgery. “The idea behind the project was not only to enable them to learn again and to transmit the technique to younger generations, but also to help them create a visual testimony of what happened to them. The colours and the words they choose for each part of the textile are symbolic,” says Ballón Gutiérrez.
For master weaver Jovana Lopes Paco, weaving is more than a tradition; it is at the heart of her identity. “It’s not something you learn from books, it’s a gift that someone has decided to pass on to you. In my case, it was my mother,” she says.
Master weaver Jovana Lopes Pacco helps Folopa to start her chumpi. Her mother escaped forced sterilisation and was able to pass her craft on to her daughter
Lopes Paco remembers how her mother escaped the medical teams that came to their village and was able to pass on the skills. “Not all women were so lucky,” she says. “Some died from the operations. Those who survived stopped weaving because of the pain they endured.”
“What I have observed is that a daughter or a grandson will not feel as strong a cultural connection to their community if they have not been taught their traditional crafts,” says Ballón Gutiérrez. “For the next generations, it is not just about technique, it’s about cultural transmission and identity.”
Two members of the group, Sheryl Quispe Ylla and her grandmother Tomasa Quispe Gueva, display their chumpi. ‘Qali-sano’ means health, ‘tristeza’ means sadness
She plans to exhibit the fabrics next year in the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion, a museum in Lima dedicated to the conflict that took place in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s. “These visual testimonies will not only serve to process their trauma and create a moment of sharing with their families, they will serve as a tool to reconnect with a society that, a quarter of a century later, still doesn’t understand what happened to them,” she says. “The legal institutions of this country are still turning their backs on them.”
Ballón Gutiérrez also hopes to host more workshops, depending on funding. For her, “reparations must be economic, legal, social and cultural. Because if all these levels are not covered, this crime could very well be repeated.”
