LIMA — On the streets of Lima — for citizens — the calculus is simple. Schools have closed because of extortion threats. Bus drivers have gone on strike because criminal networks demand a cut of their fares. Murders are rising. Robberies have become a daily occurrence. And on June 7, the nations will have a chance to choose between two radically different answers to a security crisis that has made daily life in one of South America’s most politically unstable countries feel increasingly ungovernable.
The runoff pits conservative Keiko Fujimori — daughter of the late authoritarian former president Alberto Fujimori, and the embodiment of the iron-fist approach to crime — against leftist Roberto Sánchez, a psychotherapist-turned-politician who has promised to tackle what he calls the “political mafia” at the root of Peru’s institutional decay. The two candidates are neck and neck in the polls, and the stakes extend well beyond Peru’s borders.
A Security Crisis With No Precedent
The numbers are stark. Reports of extortion nationwide quintupled between 2019 and 2025 and have been directly linked to a surge in murders. More than 40% of all extortions registered in 2025 occurred in Lima alone — a level of urban criminal penetration that forced school closures and prompted bus driver strikes across the capital.
“My top consideration will be the crime on our streets, which every week seems to be more frequent and violent,” said Joyce Guarníz, a Lima jazz saxophonist. “I want to hear real solutions to the lawlessness” — a lawlessness that extends to illegal gold mining, tropical wood logging, and drug trafficking, activities that often connect to powerful elected officials and foster a pervasive sense of impunity.
The criminal penetration of Peru’s institutions is not a recent phenomenon — but it has accelerated dramatically. The country has been the transit point for significant cocaine flows moving from Bolivia and Colombia toward Europe and the United States, and the expansion of transnational criminal networks — including Brazil’s PCC, which the U.S. designated a foreign terrorist organization last Thursday — has deepened the country’s exposure to organized crime.
Illegal mining operations in the Amazon, controlled by criminal networks, have turned remote regions into lawless territories beyond state reach.
The political backdrop makes the security crisis harder to address. Peru has cycled through eight presidents since 2016, reflecting a profound political instability that has paralyzed institutional responses to the security challenge. Every incoming government has promised to fix the crime problem. None has. The result has been a country where the state’s authority is contested not just in remote jungle regions but in the capital’s streets.
Fujimori’s Answer: The Iron Fist
Keiko Fujimori has staked her campaign on a tough-on-crime agenda. In Sunday’s final debate before the runoff, she promised to deploy the military to support the police, dismantle extortion networks, and deport foreign criminals.
One of her signature proposals is to bring back concealed judges in courtrooms — a measure used during her father’s presidency in the 1990s — as part of a broader security framework that borrows heavily from Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarian playbook.
“Today, when Peru is bleeding because of criminals and extortionists, they are asking for a Fujimori. Here I am,” she told supporters on the campaign trail.
The Fujimori name is both her greatest asset and her greatest liability. Her father’s government crushed the Shining Path insurgency in the 1990s, an achievement that remains deeply embedded in the Peruvian security psyche. It also presided over systematic human rights violations, forced sterilizations, and endemic corruption — crimes for which Alberto Fujimori was convicted and imprisoned before his death in 2023.
Keiko herself has faced corruption charges across multiple legal proceedings, surviving each one to run again.
This is Fujimori’s fourth attempt at the presidency. She lost the previous three runoffs by close margins. If victorious this time, she would be the first woman elected president in Peru.
Her tough-on-crime positioning places her squarely within the regional playbook that has worked across Latin America — from Bukele’s mass incarceration campaign in El Salvador to Noboa’s military deployment against gangs in Ecuador.
The question Peruvians are being asked to answer on June 7 is whether they trust the Fujimori name to wield that playbook responsibly.
Sánchez’s Answer: Reform the System
Roberto Sánchez enters the runoff as the underdog in a country that has been moving right on security for years. The 57-year-old psychotherapist from Huaral has promised deep reforms to law enforcement agencies and the justice system to address crime — arguing that extortion and murder are symptoms of institutional rot, not causes.
He has also pledged to free former President Pedro Castillo, the leftist leader who was imprisoned after attempting to dissolve Congress in 2022 — a position that energizes his base but alarmed centrist voters.
Sánchez’s argument is structural: that Peru’s crime crisis cannot be solved by deploying the military while the judicial system remains corrupted and the political class continues to operate with impunity. In Sunday’s debate he focused his attacks not on criminal networks but on what he called the “political mafia” — the nexus of corrupt politicians, business interests, and judicial actors he argues is the real source of Peru’s dysfunction.
It is a coherent argument. It is also a politically difficult one in a country where voters can feel extortion and murder on their streets every day and want immediate, visible responses.
A Fractured Right Heading Into Sunday
The right’s path to a Fujimori victory is complicated by the refusal of third-place finisher Rafael López Aliaga to endorse her. López Aliaga, the far-right Popular Renewal candidate, seized on logistical failures in the April 12 first round to allege electoral fraud — claims dismissed by international observers and Peruvian authorities — and was subsequently criminally charged for alleged incitement of civil disorder. Aliaga has so far declined to direct his voters toward Fujimori, which could suppress right-wing consolidation at a moment when every vote matters.
Fujimori’s Popular Force has consolidated significant legislative power and looks set to occupy about a third of congressional seats. An alliance with López Aliaga’s Popular Renewal party would seem the most natural path to a governing coalition, but the defeated candidate’s continued fraud allegations have complicated that arithmetic.
The Regional Stakes
The emergence of street crime and expanding lawlessness as electoral issues is not unique to Peru. In recent elections across Latin America — from Chile to Ecuador to Bolivia — rising violent crime has played a key role in a regional political shift toward the right.
A Fujimori victory on June 7 would add Peru to a growing bloc of right-wing governments across South America running on security-first platforms — and would arrive just two weeks before Colombia’s June 21 runoff, in which de la Espriella is already the frontrunner.
Two consecutive right-wing security victories in South America within a fortnight would further cement the regional narrative that the left’s era is ending.
For Peru, however, the regional narrative is secondary. Eight presidents in a decade have left the country’s institutions hollowed out and its population exhausted. Whoever wins on June 7 will inherit a security crisis that has already outlasted every political cycle — and a country that has run out of patience for leaders who promise solutions and deliver chaos.
The polls open Sunday.
For tips, stories, and general inquiries, contact the outlet at info@sociedadmedia.com
Sociedad Media is a Miami-based independent digital publication covering Latin America, including the worsening security situation in Peru as the nation prepares to head to the polls on Sunday, June 7, 2026.
Our reporting follows strict impartiality standards
