LIMA — The numbers are specific and they are not in dispute. More than half of the lawmakers in Peru’s Congress are facing investigations for corruption or other crimes. Homicides have doubled since 2019. Reported extortions have increased sixfold between 2019 and 2024. Every third Peruvian reported knowing a victim of extortion in 2025 — many of them small business owners.
Between August and the end of 2025, authorities registered 1,377 homicides — a 14.6% increase compared to the same period in 2024. Criminal complaints alleging extortion rose by nearly 30% in the same period, according to Human Rights Watch.
These are not the statistics of a country where organized crime is expanding despite government efforts. They are the statistics of a country where organized crime is expanding because of government decisions — decisions made, systematically and deliberately, by a Congress whose members have personal and financial reasons to ensure that the prosecutors, judges, and legal tools capable of holding them accountable do not function.
“Congress lacks legitimacy, carries out groundless initiatives, and has a twisted view of democracy and human rights,” a judge from a Peruvian high court told Human Rights Watch.
Peru votes in a June 7 runoff between Keiko Fujimori and Roberto Sánchez. But whatever the outcome, the Congress that enabled this crisis will remain in place. The problem is not the presidency. The problem is the institution that has been consuming presidents — and protecting criminals — for years.
The Congressional Architecture of Impunity
The relationship between Peru’s Congress and organized crime is not incidental. It has been constructed, piece by piece, through a series of legislative decisions that systematically removed the accountability mechanisms that a functioning democracy uses to check criminal infiltration of the state.
In 2023, Congress shortened the period for tolling the statute of limitations in criminal cases. The president of Congress, Alejandro Soto, immediately invoked the new law to seek dismissal of a criminal case pending against him. The legislation was drafted, passed, and applied to benefit the man who passed it — within weeks.
In July 2024, Congress approved a bill to narrow the definition of “organized crime,” making it harder for prosecutors to investigate related offenses, including corruption and extortion, and rendering investigative searches largely ineffective.
Extortion — the crime that had shot up most dramatically in the preceding years — was specifically excluded from the definition of organized crime, removing the legal tools that prosecutors needed to pursue the networks most directly threatening ordinary Peruvians.
Congress also weakened the Efficient Collaboration Law — the legal mechanism analogous to plea agreements in the U.S. system that had been essential to the investigations that convicted five former Peruvian presidents on corruption charges. Without it, prosecutors lose their primary tool for flipping lower-level criminal actors against higher-level organizers.
Congress used an unfair process to appoint members of the Constitutional Tribunal — the country’s highest court — which has since issued several widely-criticized rulings that favored Congress and its leading political figures. It appointed an ombudsman who has since defended congressional decisions that run counter to human rights. It has moved repeatedly to weaken the National Board of Justice — the body responsible for appointing and removing judges, prosecutors, and electoral authorities that has played a key role in protecting the separation of powers.
The cumulative effect of these decisions is documented and specific. A mosaic of private interests has been increasingly bending Peru’s government to their will, breaking the systems that could hold them and their allies accountable, and dismantling protections for human rights and the environment.
In the process, they are creating an ideal environment for organized crime to thrive, deepen corruption, and further undermine democracy.
The Illegal Gold Problem
The organized crime expanding through Peru’s weakened institutional framework is not primarily drug trafficking — the form of criminality that U.S. policy has been most focused on combating in the hemisphere. It is illegal gold mining — a crime that is structurally embedded in Peru’s economy, environmentally catastrophic, and now the country’s primary illicit economy.
Illegal gold mining, which according to former Interior Minister and security expert Carlos Basombrío is now the major illicit economy in the country, was worth an estimated $4 billion in 2023. Illegal gold mining has been increasingly associated with human trafficking and killings, particularly in remote and Indigenous areas where there is little state presence.
The illegal mining economy operates in precisely the regions where the state is weakest — the Amazonian and Andean borderlands where Congress’s dismantling of anti-corruption prosecutors and judicial independence has had the most direct effect. In those regions, illegal miners do not operate despite the state. They operate with its complicity — through local officials who have been incorporated into the mining economy, through national legislators who have weakened the legal tools that could pursue them, and through a Constitutional Tribunal that has been packed with figures amenable to the interests benefiting from the status quo.
The forestry law changes that Congress passed — which human rights organizations argued would accelerate deforestation and facilitate illegal land seizure — provide the legal cover for the land grabs that illegal mining operations require.
The narrowed definition of organized crime removes the prosecutorial means that could pursue the networks coordinating those operations. The weakened asset forfeiture law prevents prosecutors from seizing the proceeds. The statutes of limitations changes protect the politicians who enable all of it.
This is not a series of coincidental legislative failures. It is a system.
The Electoral Question
Peru’s April 12 first-round election produced a runoff between Fujimori and Sánchez — the June 7 vote that will determine the country’s president for the next five years. The security and organized crime crisis is the defining issue of the campaign. What neither candidate has answered convincingly is what they intend to do about the Congress that created it.
Peru is approaching its June 7 runoff amid unprecedented rise in organized criminal activity and a party system in ruins. The danger is clear: when democracy cannot guarantee security or stability, it loses its moral and practical legitimacy. Candidates who promise order at any cost will likely find a receptive audience among voters who feel abandoned by their government and terrorized by crime.
The campaign rhetoric has reflected that dynamic. Candidates including Carlos Álvarez described himself as “the Peruvian Bukele” and said that if in office he would designate all criminals as military targets subject to death if they did not surrender. Rafael López Aliaga proposed capturing criminals, helicoptering them into prisons in the Amazon rainforest and surrounding the jails with South American bushmaster vipers. López Aliaga also proposed greater cooperation with the United States on crime and sending prisoners to CECOT in El Salvador.
These are not serious security proposals. They are performances for an electorate that has watched organized crime expand while Congress protected the people enabling it — and that is angry enough to vote for whoever sounds most willing to burn the system down.
Fujimori’s security platform is more institutionally grounded but carries its own credibility problem — her father’s administration in the 1990s achieved security results through methods that included extrajudicial executions and forced sterilizations. The Fujimori brand in Peru is simultaneously associated with the strongest anti-crime results in the country’s modern history and some of its most documented human rights violations.
Sánchez’s Castillista platform is explicitly hostile to the business and congressional interests that have been most directly implicated in the organized crime-state capture relationship — but Castillo’s own government demonstrated that ideological opposition to the existing power structure does not translate into institutional reform capacity when Congress controls the levers of the state.
What Washington Has Not Said
Washington has seemed reluctant to say or do much about the assault on the rule of law, perhaps concerned about feeding into political instability or growing Chinese influence.
That reticence is notable given the Donroe Doctrine’s explicit commitment to combating narco-corruption and state capture across the hemisphere. The Trump administration indicted the governor of Sinaloa. It designated the Clan del Golfo as a terrorist organization. It has been pressing Brazil for FTO designations of the PCC and Comando Vermelho. But Peru’s Congress — where more than half of members are under criminal investigation, where the legal tools to prosecute organized crime have been systematically dismantled, and where the result has been a documented sixfold increase in extortion and a doubling of homicides — has generated no comparable U.S. response.
If Peru continues down its path of institutional destruction, U.S. officials may soon be dealing with even more dangerous and unstable counterparts. That warning, from Human Rights Watch, was published in 2024. The institutional destruction has continued and the warning has not been heeded.
What the Runoff Will & Will Not Resolve
The June 7 runoff will produce a president. It will not produce a functioning Congress. The same legislators who dismantled the anti-corruption tools, narrowed the definition of organized crime, weakened asset forfeiture, and packed the Constitutional Tribunal will still be in their seats when the new president takes office on July 28.
The democratic reflex remains in Peru: Peruvians still take to the streets, still reject corruption, and still demand that a competent state guarantee basic services. If leveraged the right way, these demands could be channeled by a democratic and reformist leader willing to rebuild Peru’s institutional arrangements and salvage its democracy.
Whether either candidate is that leader is the question that Peruvian voters will answer in 32 days. What is documented is a Peruvian high court judge who told a foreign human rights organization that Congress “has a twisted view of democracy and human rights” — is the scale of what would need to be reversed.
Peru’s crisis is no longer just about corruption or governance. It is about the basic survival of the rule of law. Unless the next government restores both security and institutional credibility, Peru’s democracy risks becoming not merely ungovernable, but unrecognizable.
The June 7 runoff is a beginning. Not a solution.
Sociedad Media is monitoring Peru’s June 7 presidential runoff, the organized crime crisis, and democratic backsliding across Latin America. For tips and reporting, contact info@sociedadmedia.com
