Hundreds of people in Peru paid their final respects to a 23-year-old student killed in clashes with the army. Clemer Rojas was killed in the provincial capital of Ayacucho, which has emerged as an unlikely epicenter of unrest in Peru’s political crisis.
and support for protesters’ demands that elections, scheduled for 2026, be pushed up to next year. At a news conference Saturday, Peru’s first female president delivered extensive remarks in Quechua — a foreign language to past Peruvian presidents — comparing the highway blockades, acts of arson and violent protests engulfing Peru to the invisible, emotional damage suffered by children growing up in a broken home with constantly feuding parents.
In a tragic irony, Rojas was killed by a fellow conscript’s bullet. Like his father, he joined the army as part of military service for Peruvian men that is mandatory in name only: most of the draftees, like Rojas, are teenagers hailing from impoverished, Quechua-speaking homes.“He wasn’t armed,” says his father, Reider Rojas, who was dressed in black. “They fired at point-blank range. The autopsy said a bullet fired by a Galil rifle used by the army pierced his liver and lungs.
Once a thriving outpost of the Incan empire, it was vanquished in the 16th century by Spanish colonizers. Centuries later, it was renamed Ayacucho, in reference to the battle where a rebel army led by Venezuelan-born Simon Bolivar gained the definitive upper hand against royalist forces sent from Spain. Its name in native Quechua translates as “corner of death” in honor of the battle’s many casualties.
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