Self-Styled Justice in Guatemala

Susof Ramirez's family members said they had no knowledge of any involvement by him in violent activities. But in early 2004, banners began appearing around Santiago Atitlan announcing the formation of a social cleansing group. One sign warned that criminals would "reap what they have sown." The group also pledged to go after marijuana sellers and brujos -- witches who are said to cast hexes inspired by ancient Mayan beliefs.

Members of the group were soon seen patrolling the surrounding mountains in their trademark green uniforms and black masks. Last July, local journalists and police said, they became bold enough to hold a public meeting on the main road leading into town.

The same evening, men in the same outfits stopped a bus. Diego Pablo Ramirez, 69, who was reputed to be a brujo, was pulled off. When he was found dead, along with a second man seized from his car that day, farmers in the area assumed the social cleansing group was behind those killings and a series of unsolved murders.

And many said they thoroughly approved.

"If you were an honest person, you had nothing to worry about," said Diego Quebac, 40, a coffee planter wearing a T-shirt and rumpled cowboy hat. "They only went after the thieves and the brujos -- the really bad people who need to be eliminated."

Lucas Quezal, 43, another farmer, said one day he cautioned the masked men not to kill people based on mere accusations.

"I said to them, 'You need to really investigate,' " he recalled. "They assured me that they spend eight months examining each case and also give people two chances to change."

Even the police acknowledged that the group's emergence coincided with a marked drop in crime.

"Robberies were way down, but of course homicides went up," Alberto Mazariegos Garcia, an officer with Santiago Atitlan's force, noted with a grim smile.

When word spread that three laborers had been abducted by the social cleansing group on the morning of Jan. 30, rumors started circulating in the community about their alleged misdeeds -- long before their corpses were found.

It was whispered that Candido Choy Quebac, 41, had been paying pregnant women to give up their children for adoption or organ theft. Choy Quebac's son, Abraan Choy Ramirez, 23, and his friend Miguel Xiquin Toc, 25, were said to be petty crooks.

But the men's families insist they were simple construction workers. Choy Ramirez's mother, Rosa, 40, said she had been walking with her son and his friend along a path to the main road when the masked abductors emerged from a field of coffee plants. She said they offered no explanation for seizing the two.

"They just told me, 'Go away! These men belong to us now,' " she recalled. She said she raced back down the mountain to fetch her husband, then watched in horror as the masked men placed a rope around his neck and led him away as well.

Now she wonders how she, her daughter-in-law and the couple's three young children will get by.

"He was my only son. I have not slept since they took him," she said with misery, staring at the dirt in the yard next to the family's tiny concrete hut.

Choy Ramirez's widow, Clara, 23, sat on a rock nearby, tears streaming from her eyes as her children clung to her colorful skirt.

Not far away, on the path where the three men had been abducted, farmers heading to their coffee fields had concerns of a different kind.

"I really hope the authorities release them soon," said Diego Quebac, who still carries the receipt he purchased from the group, in case its remaining members resume their patrols. "Otherwise, see all these coffee plants?" he said, pointing with his machete at a row of leafy shrubs. "They'll all be stolen again."