GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - A crowd of 200 villagers burned to death eight men they accused of running guns and drugs in western Guatemala's mostly-Indian highlands, police reported Sunday.
In what authorities described as a carefully planned attack late Saturday, roads were blocked to trap the men, and the crowd pulled them from their trucks, doused them with gasoline and set them on fire.
''This was a well-planned attack by a few people that grew into a huge crime,'' said De Mateo Sanchez, a spokesman for Guatemala's national police force. ''The excitement attracted so many people to join.
''The family and its associates had lots of enemies in town, that is now very clear,'' Sanchez said. ''Neighbors and those who committed the crime said they were criminals.''
The attack occurred in the hamlet of Xalvaquiej, near the town of Chichicastenango, 90 miles northwest of the capital, a popular tourist destination known for its Indian handicraft market.
It was the largest instance of mob vigilante justice in several years. In April, a Japanese tourist and a Guatemalan man were attacked by mobs; dozens of similar attacks occurred in 1998 and 1999.
Five of the victims were members of a family that operated trucks that carried people and supplies through the region, Sanchez said.
The victims were all men, including a 60-year-old and his four sons ages 26, 23, 18 and 17. Sanchez said two of the remaining victims were drivers who worked for the family. The eighth man's body was burned so badly police had not determined his identity or age.
Sanchez said the villagers involved in the slayings were informed of the route the family's trucks would take through the village Saturday night by a ''small group of men who planned the crime.''
The mob blocked off the few nearby dirt roads to trap their victims. When the unsuspecting pickup trucks arrived, the villagers pulled their occupants onto the road, dowsed them with gasoline and burned them alive.
Sanchez said local authorities had ''absolutely no evidence'' that the family and its employees were involved in any crime.
''When you have a small and lonely, isolated village like this one, outsiders can be scary to many of the people that live there,'' he said. ''The victims were locals, but they came and left so much it could have seemed suspicious.''
Police spokesman Faustino Sanchez said Sunday that authorities had identified three men thought to be ringleaders of the attack.
The men, whose names have not yet been released, were locals who have since fled Xalvaquiej and are believed to be hiding in the mountain woods of the western state of Quiche, he said.
Saturday's gruesome attack in the popular and normally tranquil region came two days before Guatemalan President Alfonso Portillo is scheduled to unveil a state plan aimed at improving Guatemala's reputation for violence.
Travel groups say this country's poor world image has prompted a significant drop in tourism here recently. A Japanese tourist and a Guatemalan bus driver were stoned and beaten to death in April in the tourist village of Todos Santos Cuchuman, about 100 miles northwest of Guatemala City.
Until the April attack, Guatemala's wave of attacks - which claimed about 50 victims in 1998 and about three dozen in 1999 - had appeared to be diminishing.
A 1999 U.N. report on previous attacks here said they were often not misguided attempts at justice. Mobs were in some cases formed before any crime was committed, and then attacked people suspected of minor crimes or no crime at all.
Villages such as this one, composed of mostly indigenous people, faced the brunt of a bloody 36-year civil war. Villagers suffered violence at the hands of military and paramilitary groups in the protracted war.
