Last week—a couple of days after public transport unions in Lima announced their eighth strike of the year, and a few days before Peru churned through its eighth president in a decade—the city hosted the first Charlie Kirk memorial in Latin America. It happens to be a beautiful Saturday: sunny, warm, rare for a city that spends most of the year drowned in fog from the Pacific ocean. Several people are dozing off in the few dozen plastic chairs set before the stage. On large screens nearby, videos of Kirk subtitled in Spanish play on loop, though the sun’s glare washes them out. Small groups from evangelical churches, senior citizens’ organizations and soup kitchens are trickling in. When I ask some attendants why they have come, they say it is because their church leader invited them via WhatsApp, or because their organization has offered to bus them in, or because the city government has waived the park’s entrance fee for the day. Every so often I hear one of them yell over the noise, “Who’s that Charlie?” (Everyone here calls him “Charlie”). When I ask this question back to them, they say they don’t know, or that they are here to kill time, or they turn the question back to me: “That gringo who got shot, no?”
Over three thousand miles away from the United States, it doesn’t really matter who Kirk was—a YouTuber, an agitator, or little more than a viral video forwarded again and again until it erodes into a blurry echo. The event is really a rally for Rafael López Aliaga, Lima’s mayor and a hopeful for next year’s presidential elections. López Aliaga, a bulbous, clammy businessman and a member of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei, first rose to fame during his failed 2021 presidential run, when he claimed to use a cilice to flagellate himself daily and repress his sexual urges by thinking of the Virgin Mary. He became mayor in 2023, promising to turn Lima into a “world power.” Known online by the nickname Porky, López Aliaga was in Madrid when Kirk died. A few days later, speaking at a conference organized by Spain’s right-wing Vox party, he promised the crowd an “apotheotic ceremony.” Soon after, the Lima city government announced “an afternoon of happiness and joy” in a major public park in honor of the American, complete with music, performances, and a light show.
An hour after the scheduled start, we are still milling around. Most of the crowd is older (the average age appears to be around sixty), so the few young people there stand out. One man in his late twenties is wearing an angular black shirt and wide pants tucked into knee-high military boots. As I walk closer, I notice he has a red, white, and black armband, an Iron Cross pinned to his shirt and a peaked cap with what he tells me is the logo of his podcast. He says his outfit is a recreation of a 1933 Peruvian Blackshirt paramilitary group (he made it to order). His brother, in plainclothes beside a tripod, tells me they are both streamers. He pulls up Kick, a sort of libertarian Australian Twitch that’s become immensely popular in Peru over the past two years, lifting some of its stars to the level of national celebrities. Then he shows me his brother’s 34-follower channel. I ask him if he is a blackshirt too. “No,” he says, and looks me right in the eye. “I’m a gamer.”
The show begins around 3:30 p.m., when two singers in matching beige pantsuits—the emcee asks us to clap for La Mar Worship—take the stage. I am standing next to the only other noticeable zoomer, a guy wrapped in a flag reading #AmanecerPatriota, or #PatriotAwakening, and a MAGA hat. He explains that #PatriotAwakening is his heterodox right-wing group, mixing fascistophiles, conservative nationalists and third-positionists, though they hold an alliance with a Hispanist group called Brigada Cervantes too. “We’re a soup!” he says, grinning. To gear up for next year’s elections, they’ve signed up for a gym and are training with former military members. If things go wrong at the ballot box, they are ready for “something like January 6th or Charlottesville.”
Here’s the thing. I’m terminally online too, I have been for a long time, and as a result I know that being terminally online is comorbid with becoming more American. Local memes and national algorithmic bubbles—these are the exceptions that confirm the rule: you could spend your whole life online without ever once learning about the social mores of the Latin American internet, but good luck escaping the next J.D. Vance controversy or the latest Taylor Swift release. So America’s culture war seeps into the water and reappears, slightly mutated, down south. We have our YouTube-native pundits, young men who speak in the same pageant cadences as Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. We catch the same moral panics with a couple of years of lag. We’re starting to see the first shoots of incel jargon and groyper-style antisemitism spring around Spanish-language Twitter. I expect we’ll have a Yarvin by 2028.
The extent to which these online trends impact the real world here, this world lit by the sun, is hard to measure. Outside of a couple of high-profile controversies, few of these accounts are viral in any real sense. Even fewer of them have been able to seize political power. (As for #PatriotAwakening, it numbers about sixteen or seventeen people.) It’s unclear to me if this will be changing. As La Mar Worship leaves the stage, two teenagers yell “I am Charlie Kirk! I am Charlie Kirk!” They have their phones out, though I can’t tell if they are livestreaming or only taking photos. Watching them, I think of the dibujitos, or “the cartoons”—the commenters, mostly young and male, who use children’s cartoons as their streaming chat avatars, and who over the past year have congealed into an anarchic anonymous collective. A few months ago, they “killed” a streamer by hacking Peru’s civil registry database and marking him as deceased. (They also hacked the Ministry of Health database and listed his cause of death as AIDS.) One of the two mainstream politicians who acknowledge their existence is Franco Vidal, a district mayor, lawyer, and streamer. A couple of weeks ago, he was recording himself walking around his district when one of his constituents approached him, yelling. As he shoved past her, he turned to his camera and told his chat: “Go kill her in the database.” The only other politician to address them has been López Aliaga, grinning in a viral TikTok: “Watch out for the dibujitos. Don’t mess with the dibujitos!”
For now, López Aliaga and Vidal are happy to put on a show and, in return, to wield the collective as a sort of private online army. Anyway, the boys keep shouting: “I love you, Porky! Porky, I love you!” I can’t tell if it’s ironic, but I’m starting to think that’s beside the point: López Aliaga currently leads the polls for next year’s presidential election.
Next up: an avalanche of speeches. A councilwoman delivers a fire-and-brimstone sermon about defending the right to life and family—“and, of course, the resolve to do so of our dear Rafael López Aliaga.” A spokesman for the World Missionary Movement says his daughter called him in tears when Charlie died: “Charlie was like her pastor. Well,” he adds, “I’m a pastor too—blessed be the name of the Lord.” A lawyer with an accent, the only American onstage, declares that “the winds of freedom” are blowing in Lima, the same winds that brought Javier Milei to power in Argentina, the same that fuel protests to free Bolsonaro in Brazil. The day is not cooling down yet, and city staff are starting to hand out bottled water and disposable sun hats. Another congressman, also wearing a MAGA cap, tells us we’re living in wonderful times in Lima. “They said brown people couldn’t come here to honor Charlie. Lies! Here we are, brown people! Here we are, Peruvians!” Yet another speaker, a pro-life congresswoman, condemns the degenerates who celebrated Kirk’s death, though in Peru the news barely rippled through mainstream media. Another claims the nation is fighting a war against wokeness—a strange concern in a country where neither abortion nor same-sex marriage is legal.
Finally, López Aliaga appears. Rubicund and porcine, he tells us that God and Christ want us to fight the Left. That Peru and Hungary are very similar countries. That we’re going to conquer Spain. (At this point, I exchange a quick mystified glance with the two teenagers.) That the Lima municipality is awarding Charlie a posthumous diploma for bravery. Then he waves a sheet of paper. The crowd—slowly trickling into the venue through the evening, and now a few hundred strong—begins to applaud.
And as Aliaga and his acolytes exit the stage, the crowd rushes to leave. I see a long line of attendees waiting at a table where city workers are handing out free soup. Nearby, a man waves a giant Israeli flag. A child hands me a flyer from a church and asks: “Do you feel ready to die?” She must be six or seven years old. “Do you feel your soul is ready to meet God, like Charlie’s was?”
On my way out, I run into a friend who had wanted to cover the event but arrived too late. As we walk, we talk about next year’s elections. The extraordinary rise in organized crime across Lima has fueled a wave of “Gen Z protests” whose logo, like in Nepal and Indonesia, is the pirate flag from One Piece. But beyond a shared frustration with the political status quo, these protests aren’t particularly left or right. Nobody is a hardliner. If anything, they’re driven by anomie.
“Just like Kirk’s killer,” my friend says. Next year, he adds, whoever can mobilize this crowd of tired, disaffected, nonpartisan young people will win. Outside the park gates—where, around the time the memorial started, the city began charging admission again—a small protest against the memorial is sputtering out. Sixteen or seventeen people wave trans and Palestinian flags and sit beside photos of the nearly fifty people killed in 2023 during protests against the current government. If this counterprotest never gained traction, I think, it was because it lacked a centripetal force, a clown to cling to. (A couple days later, the president would be ousted and replaced by a young man who received fewer than fifteen thousand votes when he ran for congress and quickly became known as a prolific follower of adult accounts on Instagram.)
The night of the rally, I’m at a party telling my friends about my afternoon when somebody asks me if I saw the gay kiss-in. I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he showed me a viral tweet calling people to congregate for one as a protest at the Kirk memorial. Four thousand likes, almost a hundred thousand views. Nobody showed up, of course. Why would they? It was just a joke online.
Perhaps the present moment could best be described as a mirror for the abstract “campus” that haunts our polemics: it is like your middle school, recollected in a nightmare in which you’re forced to return. The anxiety is everywhere and nowhere, latched to the paranoid geography of the red and blue electoral map. It turns twenty thousand students’ bodies into a single, formless body, and their professors into a hostile, invading force.
I hadn’t seen anything like it since high school, when a bored, drunk childhood friend pulled up LiveLeak.com in his kitchen and scrolled until he found a music-video compilation of Islamic State executions. Doom metal played while masked men calmly lopped off the heads of nameless victims. My friend’s expression was blithe and blank. Years later, watching this gory video of Charlie Kirk dying by the Wasatch Mountains under a banner reading “PROVE ME WRONG,” I felt the cold familiarity of being a teenager again.
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