LIMA, Peru — At least 17 people were killed in southern Peru in a matter of hours on Monday amid ongoing protests over the ouster of the former president, an extraordinary spasm of violence that led to criticism of excessive force by the military and the police.
The deaths heightened concerns that the protests would continue to grow.
Peru, the fifth-most-populous nation in Latin America, has been the scene of violent demonstrations since mid-December, when the country’s leftist president, Pedro Castillo, who had promised to address longstanding issues of poverty and inequality, attempted to dissolve Congress and rule by decree. The move was widely condemned as unconstitutional and Mr. Castillo was arrested and replaced by his vice president.
Supporters of Mr. Castillo, many of them living in impoverished rural regions, quickly took to the streets to demand new general elections, with many claiming they had been stripped of the right to be governed by the man they had voted into office just one year earlier.
The violence, in the southern city of Juliaca near the border with Bolivia on Monday, marked the deadliest clash between civilians and armed actors in Peru in at least two decades, when the country emerged from a dictatorship as well as from a long and brutal fight with a violent guerrilla group, a conflict that left at least 70,000 people dead, many of them civilians.
On Tuesday, Jennie Dador, executive secretary of the National Human Rights Coordinator of Peru, an accountability group, blamed “indiscriminate use of force” by state security forces for Monday’s deaths.
“What happened yesterday was really a massacre,’’ she said. “These were extrajudicial killings.”
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Peru’s interior minister, Victor Rojas, said that the protests in Juliaca had begun peacefully but that they turned violent around 3 p.m., when about 9,000 protesters tried to take control of the airport and people armed with makeshift guns and explosives attacked police.
Mr. Rojas claimed that security forces had acted within legal limits to defend themselves. “It became impossible to control the mob,” he said.
The country’s demonstrations began shortly after authorities arrested Mr. Castillo on charges of rebellion on Dec. 7. Over the last month, some protests have been peaceful; in other cases marchers have used slingshots to fling rocks, set up roadblocks on vital highways, burned government buildings and taken over airports.
When the new president, Dina Boluarte, a former ally of Mr. Castillo’s, declared a state of emergency in December, the military took to the streets to maintain order.
Monday’s violence brings the national death toll since Mr. Castillo’s ouster to at least 46 people, according to Peru’s ombudsman’s office. All of the dead have been civilians, the office said, with 39 people killed amid protests and seven killed in traffic accidents related to the chaos or as a result of protesters’ blockades.