RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Up to a little over two weeks ago, journalism student Alba Ñaupas, 21, a resident of El Agustino, a lower-middle-class neighborhood in eastern Lima, Peru, had never taken part in a rally. But on the night of November 9th, when she learned that Congress had ousted President Martín Vizcarra, she did not hesitate for a second.
Outraged at what she saw as politicians taking advantage of the system for their own benefit, amid the country’s deep health and economic crisis, she joined a WhatsApp group that she maintains with her college classmates and wrote: “Guys, let’s march”. Today she is part of the so-called Bicentennial Generation, the movement of young Peruvians who helped to cause the ouster of Manuel Merino, who replaced Vizcarra as President for only five days.
“My father didn’t want me to go, but then he told me that if I wanted to, he wouldn’t stop me. My mother told me to think about my sisters and my grandmother. During the pandemic, I hardly ever went out, not even to go shopping, but I said, ‘I’m sorry, Dad; I’m sorry, Mom, I can’t stand by and do nothing. Not now. If we don’t do something, who will?’ she recalls.
Like many of the youths who joined the massive demonstrations that peaked with Merino’s resignation, Ñaupas did not advocate Vizcarra but rejected a political play that, in her opinion, exposed the system’s flaws. “I was tired of everything that was happening. It’s unacceptable that these people here [the legislators] rather than making decisions thinking about people’s welfare, should be thinking about their own pockets, making a profit,” the young woman criticizes.
Although she studies at a good private university thanks to a scholarship, she took to the streets to protest about the education of her three younger sisters, because she fears that if things don’t change they could end up in the universities that low-income students usually attend, getting into debt in exchange for a poor education that will not guarantee them a job.
Peru is the most recent Latin American country where young people have engaged in a fight against a system they consider unfair. Over the past year and a half, there have been protests in Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador, where citizens aged between 18 and 30 have played an important role in achieving far-reaching changes in their democracies. The demands are diverse and respond to the pressing needs of each country.
They sometimes support other groups’ demands, such as the indigenous people in Ecuador. However, there is a common denominator: the generational factor, combined with the communication tools and codes common among youths. For instance, the use of social media.
Protesters use them to group up, organize themselves, help the injured, and search for those who disappeared during rallies, as well as to post their demands and document the rallies through channels they have created themselves on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, where they challenge mainstream media narrative when they feel it does not reflect their viewpoint.
“Over time, young people have always been very important agents of social change, and now the same thing is happening. There’s a similarity, but the tools they have at their disposal to be able to stand up for democracy are different and shorten space and time for organizing, summoning, viralizing; it’s live, they manage to organize everything very quickly,” says Peruvian sociologist Noelia Chávez, who coined the term Bicentennial Generation to refer to the group that led the protests in Peru, a nation that in 2021 will celebrate two centuries of independence.
According to a survey by the Institute of Peruvian Studies, over half of youths aged 18 to 24 took part in the protests. If the ousting of Vizcarra spontaneously drove thousands of them to the streets, the police repression of these peaceful demonstrations, which left two dead and dozens seriously injured and was broadcast through their own social media, massified the mobilization.
“San Martín Square [in Lima] was taken and there was a sense that they messed with the wrong generation,” Professor Chávez said. “This is the spirit that the Bicentennial Generation should have: citizens claiming their right to a democracy and for better representatives. They fight for that. It’s not like a sociological category, but rather like a political narrative so that we can think of ourselves as a country in a less passive, less apathetic, and much more active way in changing.”
The generation that grew up fearless
The causes that Peruvians took to the streets were as varied as the multiple reasons why they feel betrayed by their political class and their institutions, but there are two demands that have emerged as priorities among many demonstrators: police reform, a demand that arose in reaction to the violence of the security forces against protesters; and changes in the current constitution, passed during Alberto Fujimori’s government.
These two demands are similar to those of the mobilizations that began on October 18th last year in Chile, and which also had youths as protagonists.
The so-called Chilean social explosion began as an initiative of secondary school students in Santiago who decided to jump the subway turnstiles in protest against the tariff increase, in an uprising that spread across the country in a matter of days, with tens of thousands of people demanding far-reaching changes to an economic system that created a sharp imbalance.
Source: El País
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