The government cannot reduce poverty efficiently if poor families continue to have on average seven children (Peruvian Prime Minister, Gestión 12-07-1995, cited in Aramburú 2002.In 1995, the Peruvian government of Alberto Fujimori implemented a nation-wide 'family planning' promotion programme as a result of which, it was later revealed, poor, mainly rural and indigenous women were sterilized according to a quota system. Many were coerced, and some women died of unattended complications. These events have been investigated from a human rights perspective (CLADEM and Tamayo 1999, CLADEM 1998, Defensoría del Pueblo n.d.). This paper intends to widen the perspective by examining how it was possible that such neoMalthusian-motivated politics were implemented in the second half of the 1990s, after the agreements reached at the Cairo Conference on Population and Development (1994) and the Beijing Conference on Women (1995) with regard to sexual and reproductive rights.Birth control programmes directed at the poorest of the world are not new or unique to Peru. As a wide range of studies demonstrate, the poverty of -oftennon-white masses has prompted the development of active population control strategies by national and international organizations and governments (Mamdani 1972, Jaquette and Staudt 1988, Kabeer 1992. Such politics have been justified with economic developmental, environmentalist, and medical arguments. Often, as the diverse studies indicate, underlying motives for these strategies were based on fears for poverty and racial degeneration with effects beyond national borders.At a national level, the idea that populations could be 'moulded' into desired citizens has been present from the early twentieth century. As such, birth control programmes in the Third World in the second half of the twentieth century, underpinned by the assumed problem of overpopulation and poverty, have their roots in early twentieth century discourses and experiments in the fields of hygiene and eugenics (Stepan 1991). In Peru, these debates were directed at the 'Indian problem' and a fragmented national identity debated by hispanistas and indigenistas, in short, those who promoted a cultural and biological emphasis on the European heritage among Peruvians, and those who proposed an emphasis on an indigenous heritage (Hale 1996). In the 1930s and '40s, while eugenic theory had lost its intellectual appeal in most of Latin America and Europe, Peruvian physicians actively promoted eugenic ideas and policies through a state-sponsored eugenics society. These distinguished scientists were concerned with the 'quality' of the Peruvian population and the improvement of the race, while their efforts were grounded in a quest for modernity (Boesten and Drinot 2004).As such, the field of 'population' is and has always been highly charged politically. At the same time, and this is often neglected by policymakers and demogra-