The National Population Program (Spanish: Programa Nacional de Población), known as the National Program for Reproductive Health and Family Planning (Spanish: Programa Nacional de Salud Reproductiva y Planificación Familiar (PNSRPF)) from 1996 to 1998, was a project conducted in Peru in through the 1990s to reduce population growth as a way of meeting international demographic standards.

Compulsory sterilization in the case of Peru under President Alberto Fujimori was a program strictly intended to lower national population growth by decreasing the fertility rate among women.

[1] The program targeted Peru's impoverished, indigenous, and marginalized communities and therefore implied the government's intention to diminish the rural population in order to enhance future economic growth.

Within this decade-long military regime under appointed President Juan Velasco Alvarado, the Peruvian government made significant leftist reforms and intended to give justice to the poor and outlined the first defined population program in Peru's history.

"[5] The law also specifically catered to the enhancement and protection of the human rights of Peruvian citizens with its promise to ensure voluntary and informed consent in issues regarding contraception and health services.

[10] The Peruvian armed forces grew frustrated with the inability of the García administration to handle the nation's crises and began to draft a plan to overthrow his government.

[14] This volume also details plans to sterilize impoverished citizens in what Rospigliosi described as "ideas frankly similar to the Nazis", with the military writing that "the general use of sterilization processes for culturally backward and economically impoverished groups is convenient", describing these groups as "unnecessary burdens" and that "given their incorrigible character and lack of resources ... there is only their total extermination".

[14] The extermination of vulnerable Peruvians was described by planners as "an economic interest, it is an essential constant in the strategy of power and development of the state".

[4] Although Fujimori was an supporter of family planning in public, the new National Population Program and its specific goals and strategies seemingly counteracted the law's initial purpose of preserving individual human rights.

With the newly drafted version of the National Population Program (Programa Nacional de Población) under Fujimori, goals were specified in the context of demographics.

[10][22] Fujimori's new rhetoric provided an opening of international funding for population programs, specifically from USAID, following the initial disapproval of his governance on the global stage after his self-coup.

[10] The Fujimori government, especially the offices of the presidency and prime minister, determined that sterilizations were a primary tool for economic development, revealing their intentions regarding population control.

[24] President Fujimori placed pressure upon PNSRPF program staff to meet sterilization quotas and workers faced poor conditions, resulting with human rights abuses often occurring.

[24] The Fujimori government used sterilization rates as an indicator of poverty reduction, with the Fujimori-appointed program director Eduardo Yong Motta contacting clinics weekly demanding increased quotas according to staff.

[24] Fujimori's well-known micromanaging techniques also resulted with the president even visiting regional program leaders directly to demand increased sterilizations.

The counseling services provided to patients were also backed by poorly trained staff and many women were not given "quality information prior to procedures".

[4] In 1998, the Peruvian government and the Ministry of Health agreed to reform the controversial aspects of the National Population Program, establishing the Plan Nacional de Población.

Rather than a target of 2.5 births per woman as it was written in the original law in 1991, the reformed program intended to "reach a total fertility rate compatible with the individual reproductive intentions".

[27] The plan's forced sterilization of vulnerable groups through the Programa Nacional de Población has been variably described as an ethnic cleansing or genocidal operation.

[28] Jocelyn E. Getgen of Cornell University wrote that the systemic nature of sterilizations and the mens rea of officials who drafted the plan proved an act of genocide.

[32] In 1997, the newspaper La República reported on the human rights violations of the National Population Program and sparked a nationwide debate that brought the government's actions to the forefront of Peruvian media.

Because the financial support from foreign donors brought economic and political pressure upon Fujimori to meet international standards, the plan to decrease population growth consequently became more focused on quotas than individual rights and health issues.

In documents provided by the Freedom of Information Act, investigators cited E. Liagin, who reported that from 1993 to 1998, "USAID's own internal files reveal that in 1993 the US basically took over Peru's national health system" during the period of forced sterilizations, with E. Liagin concluding that it was "virtually inconceivable that sterilization abuses could have occurred in the systematic way that has been documented without the knowledge of USAID local administrators and their counterparts in Washington".