Guatemalan officials raided a compound on Friday belonging to Lev Tahor, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect with past links to child exploitation. Prosecutors said they had removed at least 160 children and teenagers from the site who they believe were the victims of human trafficking and other offenses.
No arrests were made, officials told reporters in a news conference, but a regional prosecutor, Dimas Jiménez y Jiménez, said that the authorities were considering charges including human trafficking, forced pregnancy, mistreatment of minors and rape.
“We suspect these crimes were committed by a member of the community,” Mr. Jiménez y Jiménez said. His colleague, the special prosecutor against human trafficking, Nancy Lorena Paiz García, added that officers also found bodies that had been buried on the premises. The authorities say that they have no information that the sect has used the local cemeteries, but have been made aware of possible deaths of minors that must be investigated.
Friday’s raid took place after four non-Guatemalan minors ran away from the community in November and alerted the authorities. From their statements and evidence available to officials, including medical examinations, “we could establish that these minors have indeed experienced forms of human trafficking,” Ms. Paiz García told reporters.
A group of nearly 480 police officers, soldiers, prosecutors and psychologists showed up at the gated community early on Friday to secure and remove the minors, officials said. Agents also seized electronic devices, including computers and cellphones, searched for any evidence of child pornography and explored the area with dogs to detect buried human remains.
The raid is the latest effort by Guatemalan authorities to investigate the reclusive Lev Tahor community, made up of about 500 members living on a farm surrounded by walls and a padlocked gate in the Santa Rosa department, close to Guatemala’s border with Mexico.
Some members of the group, which started in Jerusalem in the 1980s, came to the Central American country in the early 2010s. They are of various nationalities, including Guatemalan, Israeli and Canadian. Before establishing themselves in Guatemala, the community lived in Canada.
In 2018, Guatemalan authorities began to take greater notice of the sect after receiving anonymous complaints related to its activities, Lucrecia Prera, head of the Attorney General’s Office for Children and Adolescents, said in an interview.
Around that time, former members and other fugitive minors told prosecutors of forced child pregnancies, forced marriages, lack of food and an absence of health services — including cases where girls had died along with their babies during childbirth, Ms. Prera said.
The group’s leaders also repeatedly obstructed the authorities from entering the compound, she added, often alleging the group was the target of religious and political persecution.
In September, Antonio Guzmán, a spokesman for Lev Tahor in Guatemala, issued a statement addressed to President Bernardo Arévalo, calling the national prosecutor’s office an “inquisitorial institution” and accusing the authorities of “harassing and persecuting us mercilessly.” The group also rejected accusations that it had harmed children in any way.
“At no point is this an action against a religious community,” Erick Eduardo Schaeffer Cabrera, an official with the Guatemalan Public Ministry, said during Friday’s news conference. “However, it is important to emphasize that no belief, organization or profession makes its members immune from the law.”
Lev Tahor, which translates to “pure heart” in Hebrew, is an offshoot of an anti-Zionist Hasidic sect. The group reportedly eschews technology and requires its female members to wear black robes from head to toe. Some former members, and an Israeli court, have called the group a dangerous cult.
This year, the United States Attorney’s Office announced that leaders of the sect had been sentenced to 12 and 14 years in prison for kidnapping and sex trafficking crimes in a case that involved two Jewish children who disappeared from their home north of New York City.
In a statement, an organization representing Guatemala’s Jewish community distanced itself from Lev Tahor, saying the group “is not part of our association” and expressing support for the authorities “in carrying out all the necessary procedures and investigations to protect the lives and integrity of minors.”
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