Date: 14 November 2025
An Intimate Chronicle of a Youth That Won’t Give Up in Peru
I was twenty years old when I joined a march for the first time. At that age, you think you’re discovering life, but I felt like I was learning to defend it. When I talk about the young people of Peru, I’m not talking about statistics or headlines. I’m talking about us. About the nights when we return from a march with burning throats, restless hearts, and trembling bodies, not only because of the tear gas, but because of the feeling of having survived something that should never feel normal. I’m talking about the accumulated fatigue, but also about the hope that refuses to die.
I grew up in a country where politics is constantly fractured. Where corruption moves faster than solutions, and where the lives of young people, especially Afro-Peruvians, Indigenous communities, and those from working-class neighborhoods, still feel undervalued by those who govern. Yet I also grew up in a country where, despite the fear, we learned to organize, to protect one another, to hold each other tightly without needing to speak.
And now, once again, in October 2025, we have returned to the streets. They say we are protesting about pensions, corruption, and insecurity. And yes, that’s true. But deep down, we are protesting because we feel our future slipping out of our hands. Because we are tired of decisions being made far from our realities. Because we are exhausted from being told that we are too young to understand, when we are the ones surviving the consequences every day.
Even so, the most valuable thing is not our anger but the ways in which we resist.
We organize on social media, yes, but also in kitchens, in parks, in universities, and in spontaneous gatherings where politics mixes with tenderness and community. In our marches, art rises like breath: murals, songs, painted bodies, poetry on recycled cardboard. Protest becomes creativity. Protest becomes memory. Protest becomes repair.
In a country where repression has been real, caring for each other has become part of the movement. We teach each other to run together, to identify danger, to share water, to read fear in someone else’s eyes. Resisting is also staying close. We are also crying together. It is also returning the next day.
Many abroad see Peru as a country of constant political eruptions, but behind each one are young people who still believe in democracy—even if democracy has not always believed in us. We don’t just want to protect it: we want to transform it. We want a democracy where protest is not criminalized; where memory matters; where young people don’t die for raising a sign; where justice is not optional; where our voice is not treated as noise, but as a necessary part of the nation.
What is happening in Peru today is not a passing moment. It is a generation that refuses to be silent. A generation that writes from its wounds, but also from its hope. A generation that learned that dignity is not given—it is built; that the future is not waited for—it is fought for; that change is not declared—it is lived.
I write this not only as a young person, but as someone who has witnessed the strength, the tears, the creativity, the righteous anger, the exhaustion, and the relentless faith of this generation. I write because our story deserves to be told with the same heart that sustains us every day.
And because, although it sometimes hurts to admit it, in this country we continue to march not out of habit, but out of love.
Members of the YDC who contributed to this section:
Carmen Trasmonte Lavalle
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