Denying accusations from Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas
Llosa, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani said that he was a tenacious critic of the
mass sterilization campaigns carried out during the Fujimori regime.
The Lima archbishop said he rejected the texts promoted by the Ministry of
Education, where sexual information was manipulated from childhood.
"I said that these [texts] had to be thrown into the bin," the press
secretariat of the Lima Archdiocese reported.
The cardinal made his statements Saturday during his weekly radio program where
he corrected some comments made by novelist and former presidential candidate
Vargas. The writer accused him of not criticizing then President Alberto
Fujimori's forced family-planning campaign.
Referring to these contraceptive and forced sterilization campaigns, Cardinal
Cipriani emphasized that during the Fujimori era he asked that "the
country not be converted" into a "brothel."
"No one used a stronger expression," the cardinal said.
In fact, Cardinal Cipriani came under harsh government criticism from January
to March 1998 for his highly publicized attacks on the country's
family-planning methods.
During his radio program, Cardinal Cipriani also reaffirmed the Catholic
Church's defense of human life against the practice of abortion.