LIMA, Peru — At a Roman Catholic elementary school on the ramshackle outskirts of Lima, students are rambunctious and seemingly carefree. By contrast, school administrators are stressing out.

One tells NPR that gangsters are demanding that the school pay them between 50,000 and 100,000 Peruvians sols — between $14,000 and $28,000.

“They send us messages saying they know where we live,” says the administrator — who, for fear of retaliation from the gangs, does not want to reveal his identity or the name of the school. “They send us photos of grenades and pistols.”

These are not empty threats. A few weeks ago, he says, police arrested a 16-year-old in the pay of gangs as he planted a bomb at the entrance to the school. The teenager had not been a student or had other connections with the school.

Schools in Peru are easy targets for extortion. Due to the poor quality of public education, thousands of private schools have sprung up. Many are located in impoverished barrios dominated by criminals — who are now demanding a cut of their tuition fees.

Miriam Ramírez, president of one of Lima’s largest parent-teacher associations, says at least 1,000 schools in the Peruvian capital are being extorted and that most are caving into the demands of the gangs. To reduce the threat to students, some schools have switched to online classes. But she says at least five have closed down.

Miriam Ramírez is president of one of Lima’s largest parent-teacher associations and she says at least 1,000 schools in the Peruvian capital are being extorted and that most are caving into the demands of the gangs.

John Otis for NPR

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John Otis for NPR

If this keeps up, Ramírez says, “The country is going to end up in total ignorance.”

Extortion is part of a broader crime wave in Peru that gained traction during the COVID pandemic. Peru also saw a huge influx of Venezuelan migrants, including members of the Tren de Aragua criminal group that specializes in extortion — though authorities concede it is hard to definitively connect Tren de Aragua members with these school extortions.

Francisco Rivadeneyra, a former Peruvian police commander, tells NPR that corrupt cops are part of the problem. In exchange for bribes, he says, officers tip off gangs about pending police raids. NPR reached out to the Peruvian police for comment but there was no response.

Political instability has made things worse. Due to corruption scandals, Peru has had six presidents in the past nine years. In March, current President Dina Boluarte declared a state of emergency in Lima and ordered the army into the streets to help fight crime.

But analysts say it’s made little difference. Extortionists now operate in the poorest patches of Lima, areas with little policing, targeting hole-in-the-wall bodegas, streetside empanada stands and even soup kitchens. Many of the gang members themselves are from poor or working class backgrounds, authorities say, so they are moving in an environment that they already know.

“We barely have enough money to buy food supplies,” says Genoveba Huatarongo, who helps prepare 100 meals per day at a soup kitchen in the squatter community of Villa María.

Even so, she says, thugs stabbed one of her workers and then left a note demanding weekly “protection” payments. Huatarongo reported the threats to the police. To avoid similar attacks, nearby soup kitchens now pay the gangsters $14 per week, she says.

But there is some pushback.

Carla Pacheco, who runs a tiny grocery in a working-class Lima neighborhood, is refusing to make the $280 weekly payments that local gangsters are demanding, pointing out that it takes her a full month to earn that amount.

Carla Pacheco runs a tiny grocery in Lima and she is refusing to make the $280 weekly payments that local gangsters are demanding.

John Otis for NPR

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John Otis for NPR

She’s paid a heavy price. One morning she found her three cats decapitated, their heads hung in front of her store.

Though horrified, she’s holding out. To protect her kids, she changed her children’s schools to make it harder for gangsters to target them.

She rarely goes out and now dispenses groceries through her barred front door rather than allowing shoppers inside.

“I can’t support corruption because I am the daughter of policeman,” Pacheco explains. “If I pay the gangs, that would bring me down to their level.”

After a bomb was found at its front gate in March, the San Vicente School in north Lima hired private security guards and switched to online learning for several weeks. When normal classes resumed, San Vicente officials told students to wear street clothes rather than school uniforms to avoid being recognized by gang members.

“They could shoot the students in revenge,” explains Violeta Upangi, waiting outside the school to pick up her 13-year-old daughter.

Due to the threats, about 40 of San Vicente’s 1,000 students have left the school, says social studies teacher Julio León.

Rather than resist, many schools have buckled to extortion demands.

The administrator at the Catholic elementary school says his colleagues reported extortion threats to the police. But instead of going after the gangs, he says, the police recommended that the school pay them off for their own safety. As a result, the school ended up forking over the equivalent of $14,000. The school is now factoring extortion payments into its annual budgets, the administrator says.

“It was either that,” the administrator explains, “or close down the school.”

Downing Street should commit to education, health and care plans (EHCPs) to keep the trust of families who have children with special educational needs, the Labour MP who chairs the education select committee has said.

A letter to the Guardian on Monday, signed by dozens of special needs and disability charities and campaigners, warned against government changes to the Send system that would restrict or abolish EHCPs. More than 600,000 children and young people rely on EHCPs for individual support in England.

Helen Hayes, who chairs the cross-party Commons education select committee, said mistrust among many families with Send children was so apparent that ministers should commit to keeping EHCPs.

“I think at this stage that would be the right thing to do,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “We have been looking, as the education select committee, at the Send system for the last several months. We have heard extensive evidence from parents, from organisations that represent parents, from professionals and from others who are deeply involved in the system, which is failing so many children and families at the moment.

“One of the consequences of that failure is that parents really have so little trust and confidence in the Send system at the moment. And the government should take that very seriously as it charts a way forward for reform.

“It must be undertaking reform and setting out new proposals in a way that helps to build the trust and confidence of parents and which doesn’t make parents feel even more fearful than they do already about their children’s future.”

She added: “At the moment, we have a system where all of the accountability is loaded on to the statutory part of the process, the EHCP system, and I think it is understandable that many parents would feel very, very fearful when the government won’t confirm absolutely that EHCPs and all of the accountabilities that surround them will remain in place.”

The letter published in the Guardian is evidence of growing public concern, despite reassurances from the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, that no decisions have yet been taken about the fate of EHCPs.

Labour MPs who spoke to the Guardian are worried ministers are unable to explain key details of the special educational needs shake-up being considered in the schools white paper to be published in October.

Stephen Morgan, a junior education minister, reiterated Phillipson’s refusal to say whether the white paper would include plans to change or abolish EHCPs, telling Sky News he could not “get into the mechanics” of the changes for now.

However, he said change was needed: “We inherited a Send system which was broken. The previous government described it as lose, lose, lose, and I want to make sure that children get the right support where they need it, across the country.”

Hayes reiterated this wider point, saying: “It is absolutely clear to us on the select committee that we have a system which is broken. It is failing families, and the government will be wanting to look at how that system can be made to work better.

“But I think they have to take this issue of the lack of trust and confidence, the fear that parents have, and the impact that it has on the daily lives of families. This is an everyday lived reality if you are battling a system that is failing your child, and the EHCPs provide statutory certainty for some parents. It isn’t a perfect system … but it does provide important statutory protection and accountability.”

Under pressure from the Trump administration, the University of Virginia’s president of nearly seven years, James Ryan, stepped down on Friday, declaring that while he was committed to the university and inclined to fight, he could not in good conscience push back just to save his job.

The Department of Justice demanded that Ryan resign in order to resolve an investigation into whether UVA had sufficiently complied with Donald Trump’s orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion.

UVA dissolved its DEI office in March, though Trump’s lackeys claim the university didn’t go far enough in rooting out DEI.

This is the first time the Trump regime has pushed for the resignation of a university official. It’s unlikely to be the last.

On Monday, the Trump regime said Harvard University had violated federal civil rights law over the treatment of Jewish students on campus.

On Tuesday, the regime released $175m in previously frozen federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, after the school agreed to bar transgender athletes from women’s teams and delete the swimmer Lia Thomas’s records.

Let’s be clear: DEI, antisemitism, and transgender athletes are not the real reasons for these attacks on higher education. They’re excuses to give the Trump regime power over America’s colleges and universities.

Why do Trump and his lackeys want this power?

They’re following Hungarian president Viktor Orbán’s playbook for creating an “illiberal democracy” – an authoritarian state masquerading as a democracy. The playbook goes like this:

First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you. Check.

Next, intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.) Check.

Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with. Check in process.

Then focus on independent sources of information. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews. Check.

Then go after the universities.

Crapping on higher education is also good politics, as demonstrated by the congresswoman Elise Stefanik (Harvard 2006) who browbeat the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT over their responses to student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, leading to several of them being fired.

It’s good politics, because many of the 60% of adult Americans who lack college degrees are stuck in lousy jobs. Many resent the college-educated, who lord it over them economically and culturally.

But behind this cultural populism lies a deeper anti-intellectual, anti-Enlightenment ideology closer to fascism than authoritarianism.

JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has called university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Orbán’s method for ending “leftwing domination” of universities. Vance laid it all out on CBS’s Face the Nation on 19 May 2024:

Universities are controlled by leftwing foundations. They’re not controlled by the American taxpayer and yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year.

I’m not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orbán has ever done [but] I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from.

His way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”

Yet what, exactly, constitutes a “conservative idea?” That dictatorship is preferable to democracy? That white Christian nationalism is better than tolerance and openness? That social Darwinism is superior to human decency?

The claim that higher education must be more open to such “conservative ideas” is dangerous drivel.

So what’s the real, underlying reason for the Trump regime’s attack on education?

Not incidentally, that attack extends to grade school. Trump’s education department announced on Tuesday it’s withholding $6.8bn in funding for schools, and Trump has promised to dismantle the department.

Why? Because the greatest obstacle to dictatorship is an educated populace. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.

That’s why enslavers prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. Fascists burn books. Tyrants close universities.

In their quest to destroy democracy, Trump, Vance and their cronies are intent on shutting the American mind.

• Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com