Violence Grows in Peru After President Pedro Castillo Is Ousted

LIMA, Peru — A relatively peaceful, if abrupt, transfer of presidential power in Peru last week has shifted into violence and unrest as supporters of the former president intensified claims that his ouster was illegitimate and have staged attacks against police stations, courthouses, factories, airports and a military base.

The protesters, backed by organizations that represent unions, Indigenous groups and poor farmers, are demanding new elections as quickly as possible.

At the same time, the leftist leaders of several Latin American countries have thrown their support behind Peru’s former leader, Pedro Castillo, who was removed from office last Wednesday and arrested after he tried to dissolve Congress.

The resulting unrest this week has grown and spread to different parts of the country as the government, while denouncing the violence, has struggled to stabilize the situation and respond to protesters’ demands.

On Tuesday night the defense minister, Alberto Otárola, announced that the armed forces would take responsibility for protecting strategic infrastructure such as airports and hydroelectric plants, and that the government would soon declare a state of emergency for the nation’s highway system. “We are not going to deny that the situation in this country is currently serious and worrying,” he said.

At least six people have died in the clashes, according to Peru’s ombudsman’s office, with all of the dead appearing to be protesters, among them five teenagers. Amnesty International and local human rights groups have accused the police of responding, in some cases, with excessive force.

Earlier Tuesday, the ombudsman’s office had said that seven protesters died, but corrected itself after it said that a man identified to the office as dead could not be found in the country’s civil registry.

On Tuesday, the country’s new president, Dina Boluarte, called for “calm.’’

“This situation that has cast a shadow over the country is causing anguish to the entire Peruvian family,” she said, speaking outside a hospital in Lima, the capital, having declared parts of the country under a state of emergency.

“I am a mother of two children, and I do not want to be going through this situation where our loved ones are dying,” she said.

Ms. Boluarte once campaigned alongside Mr. Castillo, but later called his actions a coup attempt. She is also a leftist, and comes from the largely poor Andean department of Apurímac, where the protests first erupted.

The new president said that she would meet with leaders of Peru’s armed forces and had the option of declaring a national state of emergency, a move that would suspend some civil liberties, but that she believed “would not be necessary.”

Peruvian authorities closed at least two airports amid the protests, including the airport in Cusco, which is used by tourists visiting Machu Picchu and the surrounding region known as the Sacred Valley, an important source of income for the country.

The police and army also said that a joint base was destroyed in the department of Cusco, while about 1,000 protesters had occupied a gas plant in the same area.

Train service to and from Cusco and Machu Picchu has also been suspended, according to a travel alert from the U.S. Embassy in Lima.

The country’s new finance minister, Alex Contreras, told a local news channel, RPP, that the protests could cost various sectors in Peru between $15 million and $26 million a day.

A police general, Óscar Arriola, said that 119 police officers were wounded in recent clashes, while Amnesty International said it had verified images of police officers firing tear gas canisters from close range directly at protesters in Lima’s main plaza.

In her speech on Tuesday, Ms. Boluarte said that she “had given instructions to the police not to use any lethal weapon, not even rubber bullets,” adding that she had asked the minister of interior “to identify the people who have used these weapons that are harming our sisters and brothers.”

Mr. Castillo, a leftist former schoolteacher and union activist who won the presidential election by a narrow margin last year, had struggled to govern, facing allegations of corruption, incompetence and mismanagement, while legislators seemed bent on pushing him out.

Last week, facing a third impeachment vote, he announced that he was dissolving Congress and creating a new government that would rule by decree.

The move was widely denounced by both opponents and former allies as a coup attempt. Within hours, Mr. Castillo was arrested, Congress voted to impeach him and the vice president, Ms. Boluarte, a former ally, took office.

The events played out at such dizzying speed that many Peruvians struggled to understand what was happening. Now, many of Mr. Castillo’s supporters, particularly in the rural areas that form his base, say that they feel robbed of their vote.

Some protesters expect their movement to grow as the police respond to the demonstrations with what they call a heavy hand. They have made various legal arguments for why Mr. Castillo’s removal was unlawful, and are calling on Ms. Boluarte to move up new elections.

Ms. Boluarte has already said she would try to move the next presidential election up by two years, to 2024, an effort that will require approval from Congress.

Mr. Castillo is one of several leftist presidents who was swept to power in Latin America in recent years amid deep anger at establishment politicians. Many of these leaders have sought to unite around a common purpose that seeks to address deepening inequality and wrest control from the political elite.

On Monday evening, several of those aligned nations issued a joint statement calling the ousted president “the victim of undemocratic harassment” and urging Peru’s political leaders to respect the “will of the citizens” who voted him in.

The statement, issued by the governments of Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina and Mexico, referred to Mr. Castillo as “president” and made no mention of Ms. Boluarte.

Mexico’s leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in his morning address to reporters on Tuesday, said his administration would continue to consider Mr. Castillo the leader of Peru “until they resolve it there in terms of legality.”

The relationship between the two nations, he said, was “on pause.”

Last year, Mr. Castillo campaigned on a vow to address poverty and inequality. His motto — “no more poor people in a rich country” — and his call for a rewrite of the constitution energized many rural farmers in a deeply unequal nation where the urban elite vehemently opposed his candidacy.

The protests are backed by the largest federation of labor unions, the largest association of Indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon and many organizations representing poor farmers, among other groups.

Jaime Borda, who leads Red Muqui, a network of environmental and human rights organizations that work in rural Peru, said the anger in the streets stemmed not just from frustration over Mr. Castillo’s removal but from a larger “discontent of the population for all the accumulated things of these last years,” namely a political system that to many seemed to encourage corruption and serve the elite.

Many protesters, he said, believed that Mr. Castillo had been driven toward political self-destruction by that same elite political class.

Mr. Castillo’s supporters “are very aware that in the end that was not the way to go, to attempt a coup d’état,” he said. “But people also tell you that we have elected him as our representative, we have elected him as our president.”

Cunarc, an association of rural security patrols, is among the groups leading the protests.

Santos Saavedra, Cunarc’s president, said that Ms. Boluarte’s call for dialogue “is going to be impossible, because the population does not recognize the de facto government.”

Victoriano Laura, 48, a miner in the city of La Rinconada, high in the Andes Mountains, said on Tuesday that many people were traveling from La Rinconada to the city of Juliaca, about 100 miles away, to protest.

“People are furious” about the president’s removal, he said. “The violence is starting because of the provocation of the police, and people aren’t going to remain quiet.”

So far, no single leader has emerged to try to unify the disparate groups. Peru has been hobbled by political upheaval and high-level corruption scandals that have led to six presidents since 2016.

In his few public appearances since his arrest on charges of rebellion, Mr. Castillo has defended his actions and shown no regret.

During his second court hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Castillo said that he had been unfairly detained and that he would “never resign.”

“Nor will I abandon this popular cause that brought me here,” he said, before calling on authorities to “stop killing these people who are thirsty for justice,” a reference to the protesters.

When a judge interrupted to ask if he wanted to say anything in his defense, Mr. Castillo responded: “I have not committed the crime of conspiracy or rebellion.”

Mitra Taj reported from Lima, Peru, and Julie Turkewitz and Genevieve Glatsky from Bogotá, Colombia.