Late into the night, mothers chanted for justice outside their children’s school in Lima after a teacher was gunned down in front of his students in the latest and most shocking example of a surge in gang violence in Peru.
CCTV footage of the incident on Monday showed panicked children running inside the school as the body of Julio César Pacheco lay slumped inside the blue metal gates of Julio C Tello in the working-class Ate Vitarte neighborhood in the capital’s east. He had been shot dead by an assassin pretending to deliver a legal notice.
The daylight murder marked a tragic new low in a crime wave that has seen a surge of racketeering and murder. The crisis sparked two days of strikes as workers expressed their fury at what they saw as dismal law enforcement, poor leadership by an unpopular government and a deliberate weakening of anti-crime legislation by the loathed congress.
Bus operators and motorized-rickshaw taxi drivers went on strike in protest against the bloodletting. They were joined by shopkeepers, street vendors, artists, hairdressers, even soup kitchen workers, all of whom had been targets for protection racket gangs who had forced them to make daily or weekly payments or face grenade attacks or even death.
In less than 12 hours on 8 October, seven murders occurred in Lima, despite a two-month state of emergency in 14 districts.
At one march this week, protestors chanted: “They are killing us” – meaning literally, but also economically, as extortion victims are mostly informal workers getting by day to day with what they earn to support themselves and their families.
“Extortion is not aimed at sectors with high economic capacity. It is mainly focused on the periphery, where there is almost no control or presence of law-enforcement agencies,” said Erika Solis, a specialist in crime and violence, and a researcher at the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at Peru’s Pontifical Catholic University.
President Dina Boluarte’s response has been “primitive and almost always populist”, Solis said, adding that it is aimed “not so much to undo crime or to reduce it, but to send a message”. The proposed measures have included raising prison terms and deploying soldiers on the streets to combat “urban terrorism”, which Solis described as a “short-term placebo” that would not satisfy the demand for effective and timely measures.
The statistics are stark. Around half of 23,000 shopkeepers are extorted, paying between $25 and $1,000 a month, according to their association; seven out of 10 transport companies make extortion payments of, on average, $4,000 a month, says the National Federation of Transport Workers; 300 building sites have been halted or threatened by violence; and 24 union leaders have been murdered since 2011, says Peru’s Federation of Civil Construction Workers.
Peru loses more than $1.6bn annually to extortion – 0.7% of its national GDP – while insecurity costs the country 3.5%, equivalent to $9.28bn, according to Lima’s Chamber of Commerce.
The number of violent deaths recorded until mid-October this year – 1,493 – has already surpassed the total number of homicides in 2023, according to Peru’s registry of deaths.
Peru’s unpopular congress is under pressure to annul a controversial law, dubbed the “pro-organized crime” law, which experts argue weakens the fight against extortion and assassination by no longer classifying them as organized crime, which carries stiffer penalties.
Moreover, the law stipulates that to carry out raids on suspected criminals, police and prosecutors must wait for their legal representatives to be present before conducting an operation. In practice, this can mean hours of waiting, allowing suspects to destroy evidence or otherwise frustrate the process.
“A raid is an investigative mechanism that requires surprise,” said Solis, adding that the law was instigated by “people in political positions who are being investigated for corruption”.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Boluarte – whose disapproval rating reached a record low of 92% according to the polls this month – was herself subject to a raid on her home amid allegations swirling around her collection of Rolex watches and luxury jewellery in April.
