The poem is a piece of secondhand storytelling. The speaker passes on what a woman told her about Ramon, a man in the Guatemalan town of Panajachel, and the details keep shifting between charming, doubtful, and frightening. He shows her a Texas driver's license, claims an "anglo name," and says the FBI wants him, though she suspects he only wanted to impress her. His real estate deals sound like scams, yet he does own land. Then the stories darken: a gun pointed at his own son, a big drug operation, enemies among vigilantes.
The speaker never says whether any of it is true. The closing lines, "at least that's what she told me," keep a careful distance, so Ramon stays a rumor more than a person. The key line is "everyone had business with crazy ramon / and nobody wanted to know him." The mood is wry and uneasy, a mix of small-town gossip and real menace, with a sense of loneliness at the center of the legend.