At the Iglesia de Dios church deep in the rainforest of Panama’s Caribbean coast, a number of unsettling objects attest to the horrific events which took place here.

A black and red accordion stands among the overturned pews, children’s belongings are strewn across the floor, and a Bible – open at the Book of Revelation – rests on the wooden pulpit.

Below it, seven crosses have been etched into the green moss of the floor.

When police arrived at the indigenous village of Alto Terrón on 14 January, they found 15 villagers tied up next to the carcass of a sacrificed goat. They had been beaten with machetes and Bibles, and some had their tongues burned with hot embers in attempt to “rid them of the devil”.

In a shallow grave nearby lay the bodies of seven other victims, including Bellin Flores, 33 – who was pregnant - and her five children.

“They came for my family armed with wire and machetes and they rounded them up like chickens,” Flores’s husband, Josué González, told the Guardian.

His six-year-old son had managed to escape and warn González, who was working in a nearby village. “I alerted the authorities, but they didn’t have the capacity to enter the area that evening,” he said, hugging the boy close.

By the time the officers reached the village, the violent exorcism ritual at the Nueva Luz de Dios – New Light of God – sect was well into its fourth day. Local villagers, members of the Ngäbe-Buglé indigenous group, are adamant that – were it not for a long history of state abandonment – lives could have been saved.

Panama has the highest GDP per capita in Latin America; its extreme poverty rate is just 6.6%, but in the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca – semi-autonomous indigenous region – that figure is 96%. In Alto Terrón, there was no police presence or healthcare facilities.

The sect was led by Flores’s father, Mario Plátano González, 60, and at the end of last year it started performing its rites in the church, a few hundred metres from the grass clearing that marks the centre of the village. Locals describe Plátano González as a domineering character who kept his family distant from the rest of the village.

“He was very machista, he wanted to be the only one in charge, and the family were the same” says Josué González. “They kicked the priests out of the church and said that they were the only ones who could talk to God.”

Evangelical Christianity, has grown rapidly in Latin America in recent decades, often in the wake of aggressive missionary work, but the inhabitants of Alto Terrón are Catholic and say that the sect had no ties to foreign religious groups.

According to the police’s investigating office, Rafael Baloyes, one of Plátano’s sons claimed to have had a “divine revelation” that the group needed to perform an exorcism on the people of Alto Terrón and, “if they showed no evidence that the evil had left their body then they should end their lives”.

“I could hear them singing and praying from my house,” said González. “The noises they made were frightening, but I never imagined they would go this far.”

When the rituals turned violent, the response by other villagers and the Panamanian authorities was complicated by an absence of local police and health services – and the village’s isolation.