AHUAS, Honduras — The orange glow of a burning house brightened the morning sky. Then another and another. Four homes were set ablaze in this muddy river town just hours after the Honduran and American authorities swooped down in helicopters as part of a major drug raid that recovered a half ton of cocaine.

“At first we had no idea what was happening,” Sinicio Ordoñez, a local leader, said of the fires.

It soon became clear: the burned homes were not part of the raid itself, but retaliatory attacks by residents against their neighbors who were working with drug traffickers. As angry as residents were with the Honduran and American governments for a joint commando operation on May 11 that they insist took the lives of four innocent people, they had rage to spare for those who have helped make this poor town on the Mosquito Coast a way station for cocaine moving from the Andes to the United States.

“The drug activity here creates a danger to all of us,” said Mr. Ordoñez, president of the indigenous Council of Elders. “The people here, they just wanted to be rid of it.”