Meanwhile, many more victims’ stories have emerged. In 2013, the interactive Quipu project began enabling women to call in and share their stories via telephone, building an online oral history. Yet these women’s stories were still nowhere to be found in this week’s headlines, even in write-ups of the court decision that mentioned other Fujimori-era atrocities. On a superficial level, this is because Fujimori was only formally convicted for embezzlement, bribery, authorizing death squads and rigging elections—as per the major crimes outlined in the truth commission. But at the same time, the available estimates for the sterilization campaign would make it one of the biggest such programs since Nazi Germany. Why does it receive so little attention?

Spanish colonial rule not only guaranteed sickness and death for many indigenous Peruvians, but created the fragmented and divided structures that continue to exist in Peruvian society today. That includes the geographical divide between the coastal region—predominantly urban, white and Spanish speaking—and the highlands—mostly rural, indigenous and Quechua or Aymara-speaking, not to mention the rainforest where 10 percent of the Peruvian population lives and over 17 languages are in danger of extinction. Indigenous peoples in the highlands and the Amazon are still in many ways second-class citizens, without the political and economic capital of their white and mestizo counterparts on the coast—their languages, voices and lives are disposable in the eyes of the state.

Fujimori’s sterilization campaign, which didn’t come to international attention until hundreds of thousands of indigenous and primarily Quechua-speaking women had been forced into tubal ligations, is one of several cases highlighting the indigenous populations’ disposability in Peru. In the 1980s, tens of thousands of indigenous peoples in Ayacucho were massacred by the Shining Path, a Maoist terrorist groups that grew its base in the Quechua highlands.* The massacres went unnoticed by the Peruvian state for years—and many innocent indigenous people were subsequently caught in crossfire and killed by the Peruvian military itself.

Political amnesia has consequences—ones Fujimori and his political party have profited from time and time again. Peruvian journalist César Hildebrandt has gone so far as to refer to a “Peruvian Alzheimer’s” going back to the 1990s, when Fujimori consolidated support through the false claim that he was responsible for capturing Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán—even though the counterterrorism directorate police force that carried out the operation was not under his supervision. Collective misremembering of 90s-era crimes has also allowed for Fujimorismo, the political ideology and personality cult built around Fujimori and his family that includes his daughter’s Fuerza Popular party, to grow. Since Fujimori’s initial arrest and sentencing in 2009, his daughter Keiko’s party has gained the majority in congress—through a system that was constitutionally drafted by her father—and nearly won the presidency in 2016.