Women sterilised in the late 1990s under a Peruvian government scheme show no signs of relenting in their long fight for justice

Guillermina Huaman, 42, struggles to find the words in Spanish to express her grief and rage. It is in her mother tongue, Quechua, a language widely spoken in Peru's southern highlands, that she explains how public healthcare medics terminated her pregnancy at three months during what she thought was a routine check-up.

She remembers being anaesthetised after being told she was to be given vitamins intravenously. When she awoke she saw that her abdomen had been cut and stiched. She had been sterilised and her foetus aborted.

"They told me I wasn't pregnant, but I knew that I was," she sobs. Hers is one of many accounts of coercion in the forced sterilisation of 2,074 poor, rural women, many of whom were illiterate and spoke little Spanish, between 1995 and 2000.

The women have been fighting for some sort of justice and compensation for years.

Their legal case began in 2003, when the state paid compensation to the family of Mamérita Mestanza, who died during a surgical sterilisation in 1998. In 2004, the Peruvian state pledged before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate and sanction those responsible for the sterilisation campaign. Legal proceedings were opened but then shelved in 2009 only to be re-opened in 2011.

This January, however, a judicial investigation was closed after a prosecutor, Marco Guzman, said he found no evidence that women were systematically coerced into sterilisation. Lawyers are appealing the decision on the grounds that sufficient evidence of human rights abuses exists. Campaigners say they have succeeded in ensuring that a senior prosecutor will re-examine the case.

Alberto Fujimori, who was Peru's president between 1990 and 2000, is serving a 25-year sentence for authorising death squad killings and corruption. Both he and one of the investigated health ministers, Alejandro Aguinaga, now a congressman for his political party, maintain the sterilisations were consensual.

"You can't force someone into the operating room. This was a reproductive health programme with backing from international institutions," Aguinaga says.

In 1995, the Peruvian government legalised surgical sterilisation. The "voluntary surgical contraception" (VSC) programme began as part of a poverty reduction campaign.

Fujimori wanted to reduce the birthrate from an average of more than 3.7 births a woman in 1995. According to World Bank figures, the birthrate stood at 2.5 by 2011.

The US agency for international development, USAid, gave $25m (£15) over five years to women's rights NGO Manuela Ramos to implement ReproSalud, a family planning programme that included VSC. But when evidence of the forced sterilisations emerged in 1998, in an investigation by other women's groups called "Nada Personal" (Nothing Personal), Manuela Ramos joined Peru's human rights ombudsman in reporting the abuses.

In 1998, Joseph Rees, an adviser to the US congressional sub-committee for International Operations and Human Rights, said the US should stop all funding for family planning programmes until it was clear the "sterilisation goals and related abuses" would be discontinued.

In a 2004 document seen by the Guardian, USAid says it "denied funding and support to the VSC campaign and took proactive steps towards promoting changes" in the Peruvian government's strategy, adding that it "separated assistance to ensure no support went to campaigns".

"During the campaigns … physicians had to perform a number of surgical interventions in order to reach an annual goal imposed by the Peruvian government," says University of Kent PhD candidate Ines Ruiz, the director of A Futile Voice, a film about Peru's forced sterilisations.

"The women were not only misinformed, taking advantage of the fact they were illiterate or Quechua-speaking, but also had been coerced or threatened that they would not receive food or medicine if they refused," she adds.

Peruvian heath ministry manuals said the women should be given at least two prior counselling sessions, at which they should be told that the procedure was irreversible and given 48 hours to make a decision. These guidelines were largely ignored.

Concepcion Condori, 48, a mother of three, was sterilised in 1999 after giving birth.

"What have you done to me? I asked the nurse. This is by order of the government, she said to me, you people have many children. This is the way it has to be."

She still suffers abdominal pains and is unable to do any heavy work in her village. But the stigma of infertility has been even harder to bear.

"It's as if our bodies are dead. When it comes to intimacy with our husbands there's no feeling, and after they beat us because they say we're no good for anything."

"They took advantage of us because we don't know how to read and write because we're from the country," says Serafina Illa, 49, another indigenous woman from Cuzco who says she was sterilised after giving birth. Her baby later died.

According to Peru's health ministry, 346,219 sterilisations were performed on women and 24,535 on men between 1993 and 2000, more than half carried out between 1996 and 1997 alone. It has been suggested that health workers were given cash incentives of about $10 for every woman they sterilised.

"If this case does not proceed in the Peruvian courts then we'll take this to international courts," says Rossy Salazar, a lawyer with Demus, a Peru-based women's rights NGO.

"All we want is that a judicial procedure is opened so that both sides can put forward their cases and at least these women can go to a trial and hear someone say that a crime was committed against them. That's all they want to hear – it was a crime and no one should have done this to them."