Personally, I've worked since the 1980s in a number of countries in Latin America, mainly on human rights issues. I've been working very closely with human rights defenders.
In terms of Inter Pares, right now we're working in five countries in Latin America: Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, and Peru. Those are the five countries where we have the focus.
In terms of the Sepur Zarco, out of the sentence there will be.... The women have asked for education, health care. They've asked for a number of things to support their community. What they kept telling us is that they're doing this because they don't want it to ever happen again to anyone else, and that's the real motivation. That's what you hear, whether it's Guatemala, Colombia, or Peru. When you talk to women who have experienced sexual violence in the way that these women have, they have the courage to come forward because they don't want it to ever happen again to anyone.
They want people to know the truth about what happened. Often I think about the work of many human rights organizations in past years, and I think violence against women has been absent. People would talk about torture and forced disappearance and summary executions, but violence against women did not always make it into the reports. I think that's changing, and it's because of women like these courageous women from Sepur Zarco, or another group of women from Manta.
Again, I think the Canadian government has supported some of our grassroots organizations. Right now there's a campaign going on in Peru because during the Fujimori dictatorship up to 300,000 women were forcibly sterilized. They were pressured into it. These are women in the Andes, in the departments of mainly Ayacucho and Huancavelica, and the government of the day wanted to reduce the population in the area. They forcibly sterilized up to 300,000 women and 20,000 men, forcing them to have the operation or else they would not be getting food supplies or they would have other things taken away from them. That's another area that we're extremely concerned about.
Human rights groups and women's organizations in Peru are at the front of this struggle to draw attention to this. Because of their work, last year the Peruvian government set up a national registry. Our partners right now in Peru are from the Andes region, and they're working with local women to make sure that they register and that there are reparations to the women in particular who were affected by this policy.