How law legitimized and later recharacterized forced sterilization in Peru: the juridical laundering of biopower

Between 1996 and 2000, a Peruvian family planning program sterilized hundreds of thousands of people, most of them poor, rural and Indigenous women, many without free consent. The program operated under the cover of a law, a ministerial resolution, numerical sterilization targets and signed consent forms. Since 1997, Peruvian prosecutors and courts, Congress and international human rights bodies have classified the same facts in contradictory ways, for example as an accident, as ordinary crimes barred by time limits, as a lawful health program and as serious human rights violations. This raises a question for the sociology of law: how do legal documents make state control over reproduction look legitimate, and how do they shape later disputes over it? Existing research explains either how such policies were legitimized or how they were contested, but not the link between the two. To connect them, this article proposes the juridical laundering of biopower, a category with two phases. Biopower here means the state’s power over a population’s life and reproduction. First, legal documents present the state’s intervention as lawful, technical and, when framed as voluntary, consented to. Later, prosecutors, courts and other institutions place the same facts in different legal categories, and the category that prevails determines whether anyone can be held responsible. We test four propositions against the program’s documents and 34 decisions and other official acts issued between 1997 and 2026. The evidence supports three of them: the program’s own documents later served as grounds for not prosecuting its architects, the facts were classified in contradictory ways, and none of its architects was convicted. It is consistent with the fourth, on the conditions for accountability. Classifying the facts as human rights violations led to accountability only when domestic and international institutions agreed on that classification, when a binding court decision enforced it, and when time limits did not bar prosecution. The Peruvian case thus shows how a policy that the State presented as lawful can end in a finding that the State itself violated human rights, while no official is held criminally responsible. We call this outcome deferred impunity.