Due to the protest action taken by students from San Marcos University (UNMSM in its Spanish initials) at the beginning and during the academic semester 2018-I, this paper shows, in particular, the way in which a sector of Peruvian press represents or constructs discursively the university students of the referred institution, and, in general, the social actors involved in this event (e. g. Peruvian National Police). Our corpus is made up of different texts extracted from various communication media (audiovisual, radial, and written press). Theoretically, we develop a cognitive explanatory framework, which starts from the Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), and incorporates this approach with some concepts of Cognitive Linguistics (CL). According to the data, and within the theoretical framework developed, it s highlighted, on the one hand, mechanisms of perspectivization and profiling that help to enhance the student activity as a criminal act, excessive and destructive, which fades the responsibility of police officers in their presence and activity in the various scenes of student protest. On the other hand, diverse cognitive mechanisms of metaphorical and metonymic nature are reported that naturalize, discursively and explicitly, the student as a delinquent, a wild and destructive subject, as well as an infant. Thus, discourse, in general, and that of university students, in particular, is not only a form of social practice, but also the outcome of an instance of conceptualization that is created and reinforced by certain cognitive procedures based on experience and in the perception of social actors, and that brings with it strong ideological implications.