Barbers protested on Wednesday in front of the Supreme Court of Peru’s capital after two hairdressers were murdered inside their salons in Lima last week, becoming the most recent crimes which have catapulted 2024 as the year with the most homicides recorded in that country since 2017.
George Salas, a member of the Barbers of Peru guild, told The Associated Press that, according to their own investigations, up to 80% of the more than 80,000 salons suffer threats from extortionists who ask for between 800 and 2,600 dollars a month, especially in peripheral areas where “the police are never seen.” It is the first time that a barbers protest has been recorded in Peru.
They wore black T-shirts and carried signs with phrases like “cutting hair should not be a risk.” Anita Marlo, a barber who wore heart-shaped glasses, told the press that she knew what it was like to live in fear of extortion and that she “We deserve a free country,” he said.
The barbers, who numbered about a hundred, were mostly young people between 20 and 30 years old. They performed free cuts and covered those who accessed their services with capes that had the red and white colors of the Peruvian flag.
The AP visited San Juan de Lurigancho, the most populated neighborhood in Peru with 1.2 million residents, where two major prisons are located and is the capital area with the highest number of complaints for various crimes, including more than 1,000 filed by the affected by extortion.
“I try to survive,” said John Sucse, a 26-year-old barber, next to the three chairs in his salon located in an area called “red” due to the high incidence of crime. It was not difficult for Sucse to remember the extortions around him. A pharmacy in front of his business woke up a month ago with a war grenade at the door and the owner of the building where Sucse rents the premises asked her for $4,000 to “leave her alone.” He himself received a bullet, a piece of paper and a call in 2023, in which they asked him for $1,400.
He thought about reporting the extortion but was discouraged because he distrusts the police, like 66% of Peruvians, according to official data. Instead of the authorities, Sucse turned to a local organized crime man who appears unannounced from time to time and requests his barber services. “I told them and they stopped bothering me for now,” he said.
But Sucse is not sure. “This job exposes you to all kinds of people, someone comes who may be wanted by his enemies, you can’t refuse and it could be that you are cutting his hair and by killing him, they can give you you,” said the barber. who migrated from the rural Andes and claims that he has never had a vacation; He works 14 hours a day, including Sundays and even holidays like New Year’s.
According to figures from the National Computer System of Deaths, until Monday, December 2, homicides in Peru totaled 1,841 in 2024, 23% more than in 2023 and the highest figure since 2017, when Peru began recording deaths in a system. computerized and online nationwide.
His assistant Terry Masualata, 18, works part-time and studies International Business in the afternoons at a local university. Masualata said he saw on Tik Tok the video of how a man entered a salon in another area of Lima on Thursday and shot Anthony Yumbato, an 18-year-old barber who did not want to give him his cell phone, three times. He also learned of another murder of another barber, which occurred a day earlier, on Wednesday; The victim was Guillermo Marrufo, 29, who apparently refused to pay extortion. “If it happened to them, it can happen to me too,” said Masualata.
The barbers’ union complained on Tuesday that both crimes remain unpunished and that, after meeting with officials from the Ministry of the Interior, they have not found solutions to the extortions that burden them. “We want them to take care of us because they are literally killing us,” Jeremy Castellanos, another member of the union, told the press.
Extortions have quintupled between 2021 and 2023 in Peru. In 2021, 4,119 complaints were filed for this crime and in 2023, some 19,401 complaints were filed. Until the beginning of November, complaints of extortion totaled more than 16,200 cases, according to police data.
Colonel Rafael Morón, head of the first Special Brigade against Crime, told the AP that unfortunately extortions led “by the neighborhood lazy people” who often use the names of large criminal gangs and “have seen an easy way to get money from businesses” have proliferated. Through WhatsApp they send threatening messages, they take photos of the businesses, they tell them that they know where the victims’ children study, they send them videos of deaths, “they cause them terror and often force them to pay,” he added.
Musicians are also extorted
Barbers are not the only ones who have suffered violence in 2024. The buses of two cumbia music groups were shot in Lima last Sunday for not paying extortions
More than a dozen public transport bus drivers have been murdered for not paying the money requested by criminals, as well as 15 motorcycle taxi drivers in areas of the capital’s periphery.
In 2024, in an unprecedented event, a group of students from a Lima public school observed how on October 14, a man shot a teacher inside a school and killed him instantly. At this time the reasons for the crime are not known.
Private schools have also been subject to violence. Some 150 schools were extorted and more than two dozen were attacked with dynamite and gunshots in the Peruvian region of La Libertad, according to authorities.
At the beginning of October, President Dina Boluarte said in a public event that Peru “is experiencing difficult times regarding extortion and organized crime” and Prime Minister Gustavo Adrianzén recognized at the end of that month that crime “in some cities overwhelms the capacity to face them” and admitted that even from some prisons “many of the extortions come out.”
At the end of November, in a conference with the international press, The Associated Press He asked Prime Minister Gustavo Adrianzén if he had thought about resigning or if he was considering proposing the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, Juan Santiváñez, in the midst of the crisis due to the increase in violence.
Adrianzén responded by indicating that they had no planned changes in the cabinet. “If my resignation would solve (the problems), I would resign immediately, but that is not going to happen,” he said.
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