A Generation in theTrap

What it means to begin to understand—and to find that understanding is not enough.

A post from Giulia Desideri

For confidentiality reasons, the name of our youth has been changed to “Lucía” 

Her story is not an isolated one.

Lucía is a young woman from Cerro de Pasco, a city built around one of the largest open-pit mines in Peru. Years of exposure to toxic substances and heavy metals have already had irreversible effects on her health. Like many young women in the area, her reproductive system has been permanently affected.

This is not only a matter of environmental or public health impact. It is also about how that impact is lived—and understood over time.

What emerges most clearly is a contradiction: the coexistence of awareness and normalization. Severe harm is recognized, described, even experienced directly—and yet, at the same time, partially absorbed into what feels ordinary. The longer the exposure, the more the boundaries between what is harmful and what is simply “how things are” begin to blur.

Within this context, a generation grows up learning to see, but without the means to fully interpret or act. Young people like Lucía are not indifferent. They speak, they question, they try to engage. But they do so in a space where information is incomplete, support is limited, and institutional responses remain distant or insufficient.

The result is a form of fragility that is not about weakness, but about constraint: a condition in which awareness exists, but cannot easily turn into action.

Lucía’s story unfolds within this tension—between knowing and adapting, between recognizing harm and continuing to live within it.

In Cerro de Pasco, a city built around one of the largest open-pit mines in Peru, pollution is not a distant threat. It is part of daily life.

When I start speaking with Lucía, I expect something different.

She is a young activist. She studies sociology, takes part in youth forums, speaks about the environment, about rights, about children. She seems angry. Clear-headed.

When I ask her how severe the impact of the mine is, she answers without hesitation:

“Severe.”

We talk for a long time.

She tells me about the children, the anemia, the developmental problems. How the damage begins simply by being born.

Her hands stay tight inside her gloves.Her gaze fixed. Jaw set.

This is what I expect.This is what I think I understand.

Then we step outside.

She takes me to see the mine. It is vast. Much larger than I had imagined. I had seen it in photographs, in videos. But in person it resists language. I stop. For a moment I’m not even sure what to call it. We go on speaking of it as something obvious, almost self-evident. Frightening.

Then she says:

“The mine isn’t that bad.”

I stop.

It’s not the mine’s fault, she continues. It’s the people who built too close. And in any case, if the city exists at all, it is also because of this.

She repeats it more than once.

I am not sure I understand what she means.

I don’t return to that sentence immediately.I return to it later.

This is the same person who, moments before, described a severe, continuous impact that begins at birth.

“The damage is in your health from the moment you are born.”

It is cold. We are both layered in clothing. She speaks quickly, without lingering.

Lucía knows. She is beginning to understand.

But knowing does not mean being able to act.

When she speaks of young people, there is no lack of will.

There are those who want to change things. Who try to get involved, to participate.

But they feel lost. They don’t know where to begin, or how to move in any real way.

And then there are those who stop before they start.

Not because they fail to see the problem.But because they do not know how to face it.

Between those who try and fail,and those who give up before beginning,the space for action narrows.

There are few spaces to engage—hard to reach, often merely formal. Decisions are made elsewhere.

And above all, there is no one who truly listens.

“They see us as the glass generation.”

The ones who exaggerate.The ones who complain.

Her voice shifts here. She does not raise it, but something in it changes.

It is not only that they are not heard.It is that they are not taken seriously long enough that, gradually, they stop trying.

You are left alone.

You try to understand, but without tools.You try to act, but without support.

And in the meantime, life goes on there.

In a contaminated environment, without clear information. Things are learned halfway, often incorrectly. Improvised solutions are attempted—boiling water to remove heavy metals—but they do not work.

And so it continues.

We keep talking.

Toward the end, Lucía changes the subject.

This time she speaks of her mother.

She has severe anemia. Frequent hospital visits, treatments, iron supplements. The same has been recommended to her children—to Lucía as well.

Lucía herself has significant anemia, despite being very young.

Then she says it, just like that:

She has been told not to have children.Because she is sterile.And because, even if she could, they would be born with leukemia.

She says it without lowering her voice.Without pausing.

As if it has long been settled somewhere inside her.

“No one gives a solution.”

I listen.

I return to that sentence in front of the mine.

It does not hold.And at the same time, somehow, it explains itself.

This is not only about living in a contaminated environment.It is about growing up within a condition that, at a certain point, ceases to feel exceptional.

“Living badly has become normal.”

Lucía says it plainly.

And so that sentence—“it’s not that bad”—remains.

Not because it is coherent.But because it is possible.

It is possible to be a young activist, to know there is a problem, to live it in your own body—and at the same time not to fully recognize it.

It is not ignorance.It is not contradiction.

It is a condition.

A generation beginning to see, but held in place.

Trapped by incomplete information.Trapped by the absence of support.Trapped because those with more power diminish the problem.Trapped because living there also means depending on the system itself.

“There are young people who want to change things. What’s missing is support.”

And so the question is not only what is happening.

It is what is needed to get out of this condition.

To fully understand what is being lived.To have the tools to recognize it.Not to be left alone in the process.

This is where interventions like those of Future Rights APS take shape—not as immediate solutions, but as the possibility of beginning to build what is missing today: accessible information, practical tools, spaces where awareness can become action.

I return to that sentence in front of the mine.

It does not hold.And yet, in some way, it explains itself.

Perhaps this is the most difficult point:

to understand how far one can truly see—and to discover that it is not enough.

Giulia Desideri