Anti-government protests in Peru entered a second day as the youth-led Generation Z collective returned to the streets of Lima to challenge President Dina Boluarte and a controversial new pension law. The supplied report says anger escalated after Congress passed a measure requiring young adults to contribute to private pension funds, even though many work in insecure conditions.
The scale of the unrest was visible in the casualty count. According to the report, Saturday’s clashes near the presidential and parliamentary buildings injured at least 18 people, including police officers and journalists. By Sunday, police were deployed heavily around the city as hundreds of demonstrators marched again toward the seat of Boluarte’s administration. The violence included stone throwing and Molotov cocktails from protesters, while officers responded with tear gas.
The protests are not only about the pension law. The report says they are part of a broader wave of frustration that has been building for months, driven by organized crime, extortion and a widespread belief that the government and Congress are corrupt. That matters because it gives the demonstrations a wider political frame: the pension issue may have triggered the latest surge, but the grievances run far deeper than one piece of legislation.
The article also shows how contested the policing of the protests has become. The National Association of Journalists of Peru said six journalists were hit by pellets fired by police while covering the unrest. The union and the National Human Rights Coordinator both denounced police repression. Those claims turn the protests into a media and civil-liberties story as much as a political one, especially given the reports that images of injured protesters were spreading on social media.
Boluarte’s own political standing is part of the backdrop. The report says her popularity has plummeted and that nearly 80 percent of Peruvians say they are ashamed of the government, with 85 percent saying the same of Congress, according to a survey published by El Comercio. Her term is set to end in July 2026, which gives the protests a sense of urgency as well as anger. The source does not predict what happens next, but it makes clear that the public mood has turned sharply against the institutions now being challenged in the street.
The police response is now part of the political argument the protest movement is making. When journalists report being hit by pellets and rights groups accuse officers of repression, the state is no longer just confronting a crowd; it is defending its conduct in public. The report does not say how the government plans to answer the anger over corruption or the pension law, but the scale of turnout and the intensity of the street clashes show that the issue has moved beyond policy debate. It has become a broader rejection of how power is being exercised in Lima.
