Cristóbal de Asín noticed something that bothered him long before he had the words for it. The news, Peruvian news, international news, news shared in group chats and on Instagram, almost always instead of informing the public, spread heatred towards people for who just wanted to be themselves. The same news that claimed to fight for people's well being where weaponizing the tool they claimed to use for safekeeping. Not only that, as Cristobal grew up he started to realize that the stories he cared about most were just wrong. Not necessarily lying. Just... incomplete. Flattened. Stripped of the context that would have made them actually mean something.
And he saw the repercussion in his own communitty. He watched LGBTQ+ friends and community members navigate hostility — at school, in their neighbourhoods, in their own homes — while the media either ignored it entirely or reduced it to a political football. He read Peruvian coverage of the civil union bill that mentioned the vote but never the people it affected. He read international coverage of Peru that only showed up when something catastrophic happened.
The frustation wasen't only about LGBTQ+ coverage- while it spiked the most- it was the whole landscape of forgotten and ignored stories by the media outlets that should have been holding power accountable, explaining complex things clearly, and making people feel like they understood the world.The people who paid the highest price for that failure were always the ones already most vulnerable.
Cristóbal had always been drawn to reading. He'd grown up consuming news voraciously, across languages and across outlets, developing an instinct for when something was being told straight and when it wasn't. He knew what good journalism felt like, and definitly did not see it replicate in the news of his home country.
In 2026, in his 2nd year of highschool, he decided to stop waiting for someone else to build it. Refract started as an answer to a simple question: what would a news outlet look like if its first priority was clarity?
The answer was a bilingual platform, in English and Spanish, covering LGBTQ+ rights, Peruvian politics, and US policy with rigour that Peruvian media rarley manages to withstand. Every article sourced. Every fact-check published with full methodology. And alongside the journalism, a real resource page for LGBTQ+ people in Peru who need help, not just information.
Refract is not a project. It is not a school assignment. It is a publication — built by a teenager in Lima who looked at the media landscape around him, found it insufficient, and decided that was a problem worth solving.