NEW: 24 dead in Colombia as protests continue. A teen shot after kicking a police officer. A young man bleeding out as protesters shout for help. Police firing on unarmed demonstrators. Helicopters swarming overhead, tanks rolling through neighborhoods. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/world/americas/colombia-covid-protests-duque.html?smid=tw-share

A mother crying for her son.

“We are destroyed,” said Milena Meneses, 39, whose only son Santiago, 19, was killed in a protest in Colombia over the weekend.

Colombians demonstrating against growing poverty and inequality have been met with a powerful crackdown by their government, which has responded to the protests with the same militarized police force it often uses against rebel fighters and organized crime.

This explosion of frustration in Colombia, experts say, could presage unrest across Latin America, where several countries face the same combustible mix of an unrelenting pandemic, growing hardship and plummeting government revenue.

“We are all connected,” said León Valencia, a political analyst, noting that past protests in Latin America have been contagious, jumping from country to country. “This could spread across the region.”

On Wednesday, after seven days of marches and clashes that turned parts of Colombian cities into battlefields, demonstrators breached protective barriers around the nation’s Congress, attacking the building before being repelled by police.

Several people in the political party of President Iván Duque are asking him to declare a state of siege, which would grant him broad new powers.

The clashes in Colombia have left at least 24 people dead, most of them demonstrators, and at least 87 missing, and they have exacerbated the anger with officials in the capital, Bogotá, who many protesters say are increasingly out of touch with people’s everyday lives.

On Wednesday, Helena Osorio, 24, a nurse, stood at the edge of a rally in Bogotá.

“I am in pain for Colombia, I am in pain for my country,” she said. “All that we can do to make ourselves heard is to protest,” she went on, “and for that they are killing us.”

Demonstrators in Colombia now include teachers, doctors, students, members of major unions, longtime activists and Colombians who have never before taken to the streets.

Truckers are blocking major highways. And on Tuesday, demonstrators in the capital burned buses and lit over a dozen police stations on fire, singing the national anthem, yelling “assassins!” and sending officers running for their lives.

On Tuesday, Iván Duque said he would open a national dialogue to find solution to fiscal problems and other challenges.

“The results of this space will be translated into initiatives we can act upon quickly," he said.

But the police and military response in Colombia has made a conversation built around compromise extremely difficult.

“He has no political capital,” said one political analyst of president Iván Duque. “People cannot sit down to dialogue with a government that by night kills people who protest and by day extends a hand in conversation.”