By AFP | 2025-04-14

LIMA -- First they came for shop owners and bus drivers, ordering them to pay protection money on pain of death.

Now the extortion gangs terrorizing Peru have set their sights on fee-paying schools, threatening to kill staff or parents "inside or outside" the classroom unless they fork out tens of thousands of dollars.

Fearing for pupils' safety, hundreds of private schools have shut their doors and moved classes online in recent months, highlighting the worsening security crisis in the gang-plagued South American country.

The southern hemisphere's new school year began in March, but it really started only in early April for San Vicente primary and secondary school pupils in northern Lima.

Classes had barely begun in March when a gang attacked the school with explosives for refusing to pay $27,000 in protection money.

No one was injured in the attack, which damaged the entrance door, but authorities immediately ordered the school's 1,200 students to stay home for a month.

When they returned last week, children pulling brightly colored bags on wheels and anxious parents gripping their hands encountered a sobering sight: five soldiers in fatigues with assault rifles and masks standing guard at the entrance.

'Like a pandemic, with weapons'

Extortion is rife across Latin America but has grown to colossal proportions in Peru, where local gangs and transnational outfits like Venezuela's Tren de Aragua face accusations of demanding ransom from entire towns.

Million-dollar profits make the shakedown business more lucrative than drug or human trafficking, according to intelligence sources.

President Dina Boluarte in March declared a month-long state of emergency in Lima, sending soldiers into the streets to help keep the peace after a wave of killings linked to extortion -- including that of a cumbia music star, Paul Flores.

Schools are increasingly targets for crime syndicates, which see rich pickings in establishments like San Vicente that charge $1,485 in annual tuition fees.

Giannina Miranda, president of the Freedom to Educate Collective, an association of private schools, told AFP that the crime had forced 325 establishments across the country to suspend classroom learning indefinitely.

In all, racketeering has affected 500 private schools, she said.

"It's like a pandemic but with weapons," the 40-year-old father of a boy who attends San Vicente school told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The man said he lived in fear of "the most precious thing, our children" getting hurt.

Kill 'inside or outside' school

Before the attack, San Vicente's management had received a WhatsApp message from unknown persons demanding 100,000 PEN (about $27,000) not to target the school.

After the attack, the school received a new threat by video.

"I ALREADY BLEW UP YOUR SCHOOL AND YOU HAVE STILL HAVE NOT GIVEN ME A SOLUTION," read a message written on a white page, which bullets, rifles and pistols surrounded.

It ended with a threat to kill a security guard, teacher or parent "inside or outside the school."

A 70-year-old woman dropping off her grandchild at San Vicente told AFP that faced with "so much fear and tension," many families were considering keeping their children at home.

The 30-year-old mother of a six-year-old boy who attends another private school in northern Lima, Pitagoras, that has suspended classes over racketeering, told AFP she struggled to answer her son when he asked whether "something very bad is happening."

Wearing sunglasses and a mask to conceal her identity, she said: "I have to teach my son that when he goes back to school, if he hears a shot or if he hears an explosion, he has to throw himself under his desk for protection."

Under pressure

The number of complaints filed for racketeering fell 13% year on year in 2024, to 19,443, Peruvian police say.

But authorities admitted that many victims do not report threats or attacks to the police, out of fear for their lives.

In the first three months of the year, police recorded 459 homicides in urban areas in Peru -- the highest figure in two decades.

The mother of another student at Pitagoras compared the climate of terror to that instilled by a brutal left-wing insurgency in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s.