La Operacion, a documentary by Ana Maria Garcia - Puerto Rico

Learn the truth about the attempt to decimate and eradicate our people by way of birth control. This movie gives you a glimpse of how the government tricked thousands of helpless families. Why do they even call it "getting your tubes tied" it's not like you have the choice to "untie" them.

Women were encouraged to undergo this “fashionable” procedure without being informed about the operation or its consequences. When the jobs promised by the 1950s Operation Bootstrap program failed to materialize, the campaign for female sterilization intensified. In the 1960s Puerto Rican women were used as guinea pigs in the development of the birth control pill. Using data derived from these experiments, the U.S. Agency for International Development promoted sterilization and birth control in developing nations to prevent revolutions troublesome to multinational corporations.


In 1974, Puerto Rican politicians of every stripe spoke before the United Nations to present the case of genocide on the island. At that time, more than one-third (35%) of all Puerto Rican women had been sterilized. By 1981 it was 39%. These rates were actually developed on paper in 1968, but it wasn't until 6 years later that they were fully realized. In 1974, the Puerto Rican Health Department created an auxiliary section of Family Planning headed by Antonio Silva. Silva's department was to direct an extremely aggressive program of population control. Its explicit aim was to lower the birth rate, unlike other family planning programs which were designed to contribute to mothers' health.

The 1982 documentary, “La Operacion,” provides first hand accounts of the sterilization program in Puerto Rico. In the city of Barceloneta where 20,000 women were sterilized over a twenty year period, the mayor proudly boasts to the camera that his factories are filled with women and multiple schools have closed because there are no new children to enroll.

3.966 million people inhabit the island of Puerto Rico today, I'm glad the plan failed.