Peru's Murder Rate Nearly Doubled — So the Pope Came Home

Pope Leo XIV flew by helicopter into a town of about 6,000 people in the Andes on Saturday, and about 20,000 turned out to greet him. The crowd sang "Pope Leo, welcome home" — because for the man born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, this part of Peru is home. He spent nearly a decade here as a missionary and as bishop of Chiclayo. He came back with a message his old diocese needed to hear: do not answer injustice with brutality.

The visit is the emotional center of Leo's first South American trip as pope, running November 6–17. But it is also a confrontation with a grim set of numbers. Peru's homicide rate has nearly doubled over the past five years, from 5.8 to 10.7 per 100,000 people, according to official figures cited by The Associated Press. Reported extortion cases have exploded from 2,421 in 2019 to 26,734 in 2025. Crime has become Peruvians' top concern — and it helped decide the last presidential election.

A bishop returns to his own streets

Leo began Saturday at the Cathedral of St. Mary in Chiclayo, where he served as bishop from 2015 to 2023, entrusting his pontificate to the Virgin Mary in a special ceremony. Speaking there, he said people feel "threatened by the uncertainty of widespread violence and by the unspeakable suffering that continues to afflict so many of our brothers and sisters." It was not a diplomatic generality. In Chiclayo he is remembered for driving himself along winding mountain roads in a pick-up truck to reach poor, outlying communities — the same journey he made again on Saturday, this time by helicopter, 150 kilometers (93 miles) to Santa Cruz de Succhabamba, a town sitting 2,035 meters (6,675 feet) above sea level.

At the outdoor Mass there, he returned to the same theme: violence in society, and the temptation to meet it with more violence. The message matters because it comes from someone Peruvians know personally, not a visiting dignitary reading a briefing note. Leo is beloved in the region precisely because he ventured beyond the sacristy for years before anyone outside Peru knew his name.

What the numbers actually show

The figures behind the pope's warning are stark, and they are worth stating plainly. Homicides have nearly doubled in five years. Extortion reports have multiplied more than tenfold since 2019 — a crime that touches market traders, bus drivers and small businesses, the people with the least protection. And the violence is not only criminal: in Lima earlier in the trip, Leo condemned violence against women, denouncing "machismo" in Peruvian culture and calling for women to be respected and protected as gender-motivated homicides rise. Peru recorded 1,261 femicide victims between 2016 and 2024, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics.

That is why the trip has carried a heavier tone than a homecoming. The pope is expected to meet Amazonian and Indigenous peoples on Sunday, and to celebrate a final Mass in Lima on Monday before returning to the Vatican. Each stop has carried the same thread: a country he loves is becoming more dangerous, and the answer he is offering is not a policy but a refusal — a refusal to let fear turn into cruelty.

Why this visit is different from a normal papal trip

Most papal visits are state occasions: capitals, cathedrals, crowds. This one is personal in a way few are. Leo is the first pope who spent most of his adult life as a missionary in the country he is visiting, and the first American-born pope returning to the diocese he once led. The crowds know it — 20,000 people in a town of 6,000 do not turn out for a stranger.

There is also a political backdrop he has not ducked. Peru has lived through years of political instability, and crime has filled the vacuum, disrupting daily life for ordinary people. When public order frays, households quietly adapt — stocking up, changing routines, planning for disruption — the same slow erosion of normal life seen in Spain's recent wave of strikes and other countries where institutions feel distant. Leo's answer to that erosion is moral rather than technical: hold the line on how people treat each other, even when the state cannot.

Whether a pope's words change a crime wave is an open question, and honest reporting should say so. What is not in doubt is that Peru heard him. In Chiclayo and in a small Andean town that emptied itself into a field for Mass, the man they knew as Father Robert came home as pope — and used the homecoming to say the hardest thing a pastor can say to people living with violence: do not become what you are afraid of.

Sources: Al Jazeera, Associated Press.