Peru Forcibly Sterilized 300,000 Poor Women in the '90s. Now They Could Decide the Country's Future.

The most stirring art has the ability to make us stop, think, and even act, but a new interactive documentary made in Peru may just help decide the political future of the whole country. Created as a result of collaboration between the University of Bristol and London-based Chaka Studio, the Quipu project relays the story of a recent and very dark moment in Peruvian history. As many as 300,000 women in rural areas of Peru were possibly hoodwinked into being sterilized during the mid-to-late 1990s, all in the name of bringing an end to poverty.

The scale of the heinous medical campaign remained buried until recently, as the village areas most affected did not know that both neighboring and far-flung areas had also been hit. Various legal cases on the issue brought against right-wing former-president Alberto Fujimori have hit the buffers and the local headlines, but the story has largely remained unknown outside the urban centers of Peru.

“I was working for Amnesty International in Peru in the 1990s and nobody knew this was going on,” says Matthew...