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Belize

British novelist Aldous Huxley wrote what became perhaps the single most oft-quoted statement about Belize, formerly British Honduras: “If the world had any ends, British Honduras would certainly be one of them. It is not on the way from anywhere to anywhere else. It has no strategic value. It is all but uninhabited.” Huxley’s subsequent observation has been much less widely publicized: “and when Prohibition is abolished, the last of its profitable enterprises—the re-export of alcohol by rum-runners, who use Belize as their base of operations—will have gone the way of its commerce in logwood, mahogany and chicle.”1 Who could have foreseen that the illegal drug trade would become exponentially more profitable than its rum-running predecessor? In fact, at an early date the Central American drug trade encompassed Belize, with notable repercussions for Belizeans, for others in the region, and for North American drug users.

Our first case study involves a country unique among the Central American states. Its roots are British, not Spanish, and relative to its neighbors, Belize is a newly independent society, wedged among countries that gained sovereignty much earlier. In British Honduras, calls for independence grew after World War II. The Belizean nationalist movement that blossomed in the 1950s then bore fruit in the following decade, as Great Britain granted self-government in 1964. The state took the name Belize in 1973, attaining full independence in 1981.2 Thus, as Central American drug transshipment soared, the last two decades of the twentieth century marked for Belize the period just after its transition to full sovereign statehood. Equally important, Belize differed from its Central American neighbors in that its laws, judicial and political systems, and Commonwealth of Nations (British Commonwealth) membership duly reflected its British colonial past.

Map 2.1

Certain aspects of Belizean society might appear to have been inauspicious for the advent of significant drug trafficking. The country has never experienced a civil war. Instead, decolonization occurred in a relatively orderly fashion, and no leftist revolutionary movement has ever coalesced. The lack of internal conflict has sharply differentiated Belize from Guatemala, as well as El Salvador and Nicaragua, which have suffered not only from deep internal divisions but from extensive postconflict turmoil, including the continued circulation of weapons. Also unusual for the region, Belizean political culture, including both anticolonial elements and social and political traditions common to the British Caribbean, has long stressed civilian leadership. While Belize has a small army, its role in society has invariably been strictly limited.3 Firmly controlled by civilian authorities, the Belize Defense Force (BDF) has never become bloated in size, nor has it intervened in political or economic life. Hence, the prospect of corrupting a powerful officer corps has not enticed drug traffickers, as it has in neighboring Guatemala and Honduras.

In terms of geography Belize is the only of these bridge countries that is not crossed by the Pan-American Highway, that major artery for overland drug smuggling. Indeed, its road network is quite small, limiting the efficacy of ground transport. Traffickers could much more easily ship or fly narcotics from the Caribbean coasts of Honduras and Guatemala than send them overland across Belize. Thus, certain bridge-favoring factors common to much of Central America have been notably absent in Belize

Furthermore, particular aspects of Belizean society might be postulated as discouraging transshipment—bridge-disfavoring factors. Ordinarily, the Belizean government has enjoyed warm and friendly relations with Great Britain and the United States, both eager to assist in stemming regional trafficking. Two parties have contended vigorously for political power, and the media has never been cowed by government authorities or drug traffickers. Moreover, Belize has had a largely respected and independent judiciary, with cases heard in open court, sometimes before juries. This greater transparency might be expected to curtail opportunities for corruption to infect the legal system. Belize also has the smallest economy in the region, with the fewest connections to other Central American states.

And yet, by the 1990s Belize had become a key Central American bridge state. Powerful Latin American drug syndicates were frequently calling on homegrown Belizean smuggling expertise, and foreigners were deeply involved in initiating and supervising as well as participating in drug trafficking. While networks of Americans often bought and transported marijuana in the heyday of that trade in Belize, Colombian and eventually Mexican cartels used their extensive resources to stimulate a cocaine-transshipment boom starting in the late 1980s. Thereafter, leading drug-smuggling rings have regularly sent large cocaine loads through the country.

To date, however, very little scholarship has examined the development of Belizean drug trafficking. Why and how have foreign and domestic networks turned Belize into a prominent Central American bridge state? How exactly has the Belizean drug trade evolved? To what extent has it become truly extensive? How has it differed from the trade in other Central American countries? Which routes and methods have drug traffickers operating in Belize preferred, and why? Which principal organizations have operated within the country? Which Belizeans and foreigners have figured most prominently in the trade, and how have they interacted? This chapter addresses these often overlooked questions.

Bridge-Favoring Factors Relevant to Belize

Geography

The geography of Belize is strikingly well suited for drug-trafficking ventures by sea and air. Traffickers opting for maritime delivery have capitalized on the Belizean coastline, stretching for two hundred miles along the Caribbean Sea. The barrier reef, the longest in the Western Hemisphere, might be envisioned as the spine of Belizean territorial waters. It encompasses hundreds of small, deserted islands, many covered by dense mangrove swamps. The country’s tropical climate and frequent rainfall have proven to be ideal for cannabis production, and years of substantial marijuana exports have developed domestic expertise in smuggling by ship and plane.

Belizean antidrug officials have had a difficult time tracking small planes in Belizean airspace. Drug rings have used aerial transportation extensively within Belize, utilizing the country’s many airstrips servicing remote farms or communities. Not only are local radar resources quite limited, but the inland Maya Mountains, densely covered with jungle and over 3,600 feet in height, run north to southwest, east of the Guatemalan border. Belize has the lowest population density in all Central America, and its sparsely populated interior, covered in large tracts by tropical forest, has itself amounted to a bridge-favoring factor. With respect to air transit, the wild terrain and meager transportation infrastructure have greatly challenged law enforcement, while advantaging those transshipping drugs, or growing and moving them to market. Likely named for the Mayan word baliz, meaning muddy waters, Belize also features numerous swamps, lakes, slow-moving rivers, and fresh- and salt-water lagoons.4 These, too, have factored into drug-trafficking schemes involving drops from aircraft.

As a general proposition, law-enforcement officials and imprisoned traffickers alike have acknowledged that traffickers tend to favor bridge states that are closer to markets over those farther away.5 Colombian and U.S. drug syndicates have found Belize to be situated sufficiently far north in Central America that planes could import drug loads into the United States without further refueling stops in Mexico.6 This feature of Belizean geography has attracted traffickers looking to eliminate interception in Mexico or another round of payoffs to Mexican traffickers.

In fact, the other cardinal characteristic of Belizean geography is its position flanking Mexico, a drug market to be reckoned with and the prime gateway for drugs entering the United States. The easily forded Blue Creek, which becomes the Río Hondo, delineates Belize’s northwestern boundary with Mexico. Furthermore, the boundary line between Belize and Mexico, which continues south to divide Belize and Guatemala, runs through dense jungle. Consequently, even by regional standards, Belizean borders have traditionally been quite porous. Any government contending with Belizean geography would be hard-pressed to strictly control what crossed its borders, and that task has proven to be impossible given Belizean technology, resources, and political culture. Mexican cartels have thus found neighboring Belize to be a convenient stepping stone for drug shipments that would then cross Mexico by land or air.

Economy

While enjoying the significant advantages of a mostly literate populace and a political culture wedded to democracy and largely respectful of human rights, Belize has always been quite poor, marked by extensive unemployment and underemployment. This lack of economic vitality has helped to create large pools of potential collaborators for drug traffickers. In 2003 more than a third of Belizean inhabitants lived below the poverty line, and the annual per capita income stood at just over $2,600. By 2009, 43 percent of the population was classified as poor, earning less than $1,800 per year. In light of the limited economic opportunities and few legitimate avenues for personal advancement, some Belizeans have looked to earn pay from drug rings for a wide range of services. Furthermore, the potential for an individual to gain considerable money for cooperating with drug syndicates has greatly outweighed the likelihood of arrest and serious punishment. This fact of life has been plainly evident to poor citizens, government officials, and wealthy elites alike, and it certainly has not escaped the notice of cartels plotting out Caribbean basin routes.7

The nature of Belize’s largely rural and undeveloped economy has attracted drug-smuggling organizations as well.8 From independence forward, postcolonial governments have struggled to bring their citizens a higher standard of living, while making the political and legal systems function adequately despite severe budgetary constraints brought on, in part, by foreign debt that reached $144 million in 1991 and exceeded $1 billion by 2006. In the 1990s well over a third of the country’s gross domestic product was required to service Belize’s burgeoning debt.9 In this respect, Belize has typified many newly independent yet poverty-stricken postcolonial societies that have borrowed extensively to try to meet high social expectations.

Because Belize has by far the smallest population in Central America, an inadequate tax base has led to chronically insufficient revenues. Indeed, up until the early twenty-first century, when a Mennonite farmer digging a shallow well struck a modest oil deposit, the country has lacked very substantial income-producing natural resources.10 Sugar, rice, citrus, and banana operations have not delivered extensive wealth or employment, nor have shrimp, lobster, and other fisheries. Tourism, especially on the cayes and ecotourism inland, has been promising, though with limited impact for much of the population. At the macroeconomic level, ongoing balance-of-payments difficulties have contributed to persistent economic instability, and the always sizable ranks of the unemployed have swollen further when export prices fall, as has happened periodically. Continuing economic woes have thus underlaid many tangled problems of governance.

While these difficulties have constrained antidrug efforts, other national concerns and policies have actually subverted them. One scholar has noted, “The elaborate apparatus of offshore banks, shady lawyers, and anonymous corporations in Panama and the Caribbean obviously benefits the criminal underworld, but it was largely created by upperworld business leaders anxious to avoid regulations, reduce taxes, and maintain government secrecy.”11 In a similar vein, Belizean government decisions, primarily focused on other public-policy issues, have nonetheless created circumstances advantageous to drug networks.12 For instance, not only has the government pegged the currency to the U.S. dollar, but Belizean officials have repeatedly attempted to enhance their country’s revenue streams with plans and policies that have indirectly encouraged the drug trade. For instance, to attract offshore investors, Belizean legislators have fashioned rather lax banking and corporate laws. By the mid-1990s officials had registered thousands of offshore companies under the International Business Companies Act.13

Officials have also earned money for the government, and perhaps some for themselves as well, by selling Belizean citizenship to foreigners, including individuals who turned out to be criminals, and by supplying flags of convenience to vessels, including some engaged in trafficking.14 This has resulted in embarrassing incidents when authorities have discovered immense drug shipments on board.15 In 2001 authorities patrolling the coast of Mexico seized 8.8 tons of cocaine off the Belize-registered vessel Forever My Friend. That same year, in a case illustrating the globalized nature of major illegal undertakings in the twenty-first century and the manner in which organized crime linked to the former Soviet Union has penetrated the Western Hemisphere, 13 tons were seized a thousand kilometers south of Acapulco off a Belize-flagged Russian fishing trawler, the Zvezda Maru, run by a crew of Ukrainians and Russians. Then, in 2004 officials found 5 tons of cocaine on the Lugo, located near the African coast, and 4.5 and 11.6 tons on Belize-registered vessels near Mexico.

Other particular characteristics of the Belizean economy have affected the drug trade as well. For instance, Belize City—far and away the country’s largest urban area—has always tended toward commercial, rather than industrial, pastimes. Historians have described it as serving as an entrepôt port as early as 1815, and again during extensive trade with the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War.16 Traditionally, a small merchant class has dominated the city, whose larger businesses have depended on imports and a handful of exports, such as lumber, citrus, and sugar, subject to considerable price fluctuations.17 While the lack of manufacturing has largely precluded the passage of precursor chemicals, the export-import trade has screened certain trafficking endeavors and provided opportunities for others.

By the 1990s drugs had been found in various of the city’s warehouses, businesses, and hotels. In market countries, stashing drugs awaiting sales has been a particularly risky stage of the drug trade.18 If traffickers within a bridge state relatively near sizable markets could offer reasonably secure storage, this has amounted to a notable bridge-favoring factor. While speed of transit through a bridge state is one variable of interest to trafficking organizations as they determine how much of a drug to send through a country, an additional factor involves another dimension of logistics: whether secure warehousing is available in a bridge state close to targeted consumers.

Finally, with the development of the cocaine trade, money laundering has cropped up more regularly in Belize, involving much larger sums. For instance, in 2007 the suspicions of DEA and Belizean law-enforcement officials were aroused by Moises Cal, former Belmopan politician and ambassador to Guatemala, who was making frequent trips to Guatemala and Panama and had gained expensive assets that seemed out of line with his government salary. On one of his fifty trips into Panama over a two-year period, Panamanian authorities stopped Cal, who was traveling on a diplomatic passport, and found him carrying $500,000 in cash.19 Cal reportedly attempted, unsuccessfully, to bribe the officials with $110,000. In a different laundering incident late the following year, the new Belizean Financial Investigations Unit searched the Belize City residence of a family operating a MoneyGram International business and found $1.5 million in cash.20 By 2009 the U.S. State Department was listing Belize as a major money-laundering state, defined as one “whose financial institutions engage in currency transactions involving significant amounts of proceeds from international narcotics trafficking.”21

Law Enforcement

Drug-trafficking rings have often exploited underfunded and underdeveloped law-enforcement and criminal-justice institutions. In this respect, until 2005 Belize completely lacked a coast guard, much less a navy, relying instead on the Fisheries Department and a tiny BDF maritime division to patrol its territorial waters.22 While Belize has a relatively high number of police per capita, the force has lacked weapons, training, and technology adequate to counter wealthy transnational criminal networks.23 And, on land as well as at sea, authorities have been spread quite thin. By the 1990s they had proven incapable of containing the simultaneous challenges of considerable growing urban violence, much of it tied to youth gangs, and rising rural violence, often stimulated by the influx of poor immigrants. Violent crimes directly linked to the drug trade thus came to permeate the country, as substantial cocaine loads passed through, as local drug markets vastly increased in scope, and as domestic and foreign trafficking organizations vied with one another.

Belize is sufficiently small that authorities, often drawing on outside government support, could fly over, identify, and then eradicate fields of marijuana reasonably successfully, but in many other matters the grip of authorities has been quite tenuous, particularly away from the country’s handful of cities and towns. Postcolonial Belize has been not so much a purposefully decentralized state as one that has yet to be fully integrated. To this day, the country’s infrastructure is poorly developed. Its roads are still narrow, few, and slow. Much of the country remains inaccessible: tropical forest covers much of the interior; swamps and lagoons, the bulk of the coast; thick mangroves, most of the islands. In 1992 Belizean authorities estimated that the country had 140 airstrips serving isolated settlements, and the government’s radar coverage has never extended beyond thirty miles from the Belize City airport.24

As distance from Belize City increases, the reach and efficacy of law enforcement has tended to tail off dramatically. And, for purposes of stemming the drug trade, distance cannot be measured in miles as a bird might fly, but in the time it might take officials to reach a particular location. The coordination of the few police assigned to remote parts of Belize has posed continuing difficulties. Effective oversight and accountability have been infrequent, and officers have sometimes felt more loyalty to local acquaintances, with whom they might share ethnicity, kinship ties, or cultural characteristics, than to officials in far-off Belize City or in the capital of Belmopan.25 The lack of national integration has adversely affected antidrug work, as traffickers have been able to choose from multiple routes in places unlikely to attract much official attention.

It is true that a trip wire of British military forces has long been stationed in Belize, conducting jungle training and other exercises from bases in the country, and for a time soldiers from British bases periodically interrupted drug-trafficking schemes. In the 1980s and early 1990s British forces sometimes assisted Belizean law enforcement with backup and logistics, while supplying radar, helicopters, and explosives to disable unauthorized airstrips.26 In other cases, British forces stumbled upon drug-trafficking activity.27 However, in 1994 the British Forces Belize garrison was largely withdrawn, and by the mid-1990s only small numbers of British military and intelligence personnel remained, which diminished one modest deterrent to transshipment.28

Even more important, the largely undistinguished record of Belizean antidrug operations can be attributed to inadequate resources, competing government priorities, and official corruption that has particularly afflicted the police force, which has been underpaid, few in number, and sometimes outgunned. By 2003 the Belize Antidrug Unit contained only thirty-five officers. While reasonably well armed, the unit has been largely absorbed with crime in Belize City, and it has sometimes been diverted from narcotics duties to contend with other violent crimes.29 Furthermore, an array of fundamental law-enforcement problems, plainly evident at independence, still afflicted Belizean society decades later. In 2009 Harold Crooks, a former leading Jamaican police official, filed a lengthy report, commissioned by the government, that sharply criticized many aspects of the Belizean force. The Crooks report identified “an unrecognized crisis of indiscipline” among the rank-and-file police. It termed case file preparation methods “obsolete,” noting the absence of “formal mechanisms to periodically reopen serious cases.” And it called attention to the deficiencies of sporadic on-the-job training and the absence of effective coordination among agencies and ministries. In singling out the lack of the infrastructure needed to investigate complex organized crime successfully, the Crooks report observed that, rather than developing intelligence on the drug trade, the uniformed antidrug unit simply patrolled in an effort to interdict shipments. What information on organized crime existed, Crooks concluded, was of poor quality, could be accessed only by senior officers, and focused excessively on low-level operatives.30

Although Belizean legal institutions have certain notable strengths, they, too, have been ill-suited for combating sophisticated transnational criminals. In a region marked by many poorly functioning civil law legal systems that have largely failed to prosecute crime openly and expeditiously, the different common law tradition has been deeply rooted in Belize. As elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Nations, the Belizean legal system has featured prosecutors who function extensively in open court rather than penal and investigating judges who operate largely behind closed doors. Furthermore, from independence forward, the country has been able to draw on connections to other Commonwealth states.31 These have helped to shape Belizean law and have buttressed traditions of respect for judges and judicial independence. Of great use for a postcolonial developing society that has lacked lawyers, the British Loan Service has supplied Belize with experienced judges and prosecutors from elsewhere in the Commonwealth, who have rotated into the country for defined terms.

However, from the perspective of traffickers, bridge-favoring factors related to the Belizean judicial system have outweighed these disfavoring matters. Forensic capabilities have been negligible, no law specifically addresses narco-corruption, and evidence gleaned from the use of wiretaps has not been available to prosecutors. Bail has traditionally been granted at quite low sums, a policy instituted when Belize was a small, isolated tropical backwater, in which family and community ties were paramount and significant crime was infrequent. Bail practices were not formulated with powerful trafficking organizations in mind. To them, depositing a large sum to spring an associate would be a routine business cost. Hence, judges and legislators have been challenged to adjust traditional thinking about bail to suit the new reality of transnational organized crime. Furthermore, prison terms for drug trafficking have been lenient, something remarked on even by Colombian authorities, themselves not noted for stiff drug sentencing.32

Throughout the 1980s the penalties that could be assessed for international trafficking were, in the words of one foreign diplomat, “nothing more than a flea bite” for substantial drug networks.33 Even in the 1990s international drug trafficking carried relatively modest penalties of between five and ten years in prison and a fine of up to fifty thousand dollars.34 Furthermore, the 1990 Drugs Act contained so many loopholes that, as one leading judge prophetically stated, “lawyers are going to have a field day with it.”35 Within this context drug networks, aided by certain politicians as well as by many of the country’s finest and most expensive lawyers, have been able to thrive. Belizean institutions and procedures were carried over from the country’s colonial past and have then been only partially amended or reformed to deal better with organized crime. For example, until 2010 a prisoner was compelled to serve only a quarter of his or her sentence before becoming eligible for parole.36 In addition, even after Belizean laws came to provide for the forfeit to the state of assets connected to criminal activity, in practice, the police have received only a quarter of the sales price of each item of seized property. The lion’s share has gone instead to the many law-enforcement needs other than antidrug initiatives.37

Further along in the administration of justice, poor training and inadequate technical and human resources have gravely damaged criminal prosecution. More than twenty-five years after Belizean independence, the U.S. State Department observed that “the Office of Public Prosecutions remains under-trained, under-staffed, and under-funded.”38 Typically, less than half of all criminal trials have resulted in convictions.39 And, while conviction rates remain above those in neighboring legal systems, acquittals in high-profile drug cases have periodically rankled Belizean law enforcement as well as DEA officials and U.S. diplomats. Not only has witness intimidation stood out as a chronic problem, but drug networks have had the means to bribe or threaten jurors, whose pictures and personal information the local media has sometimes published.40 Prosecutors have feared that some jurors might be drug users themselves, and in any event the state has been unable to afford to sequester jurors, much less to offer them, or witnesses, credible protection from criminals.

For these reasons the government has routinely opted to send drug cases, even those involving international trafficking, to bench trials in the magistrates courts, rather than to Supreme Court jury trials. This, however, has funneled efforts to corrupt and intimidate toward the least educated, least prestigious, least compensated, and most vulnerable level of the judiciary. Moreover, such innovations as the creation of drug courts or the rotation of judges have not been tried; indeed, the office of chief magistrate tends to be occupied by the same person for lengthy periods. Even more important, given the strictly limited number of prosecutors, time and again lay magistrates have had to decide drug cases with the government represented only by so-called police prosecutors. In 1990 then chief magistrate John “Troadio” González noted that well-prepared defense lawyers have tended to “sail over” baffled and sometimes “terrified” police officers trying to act as prosecutors.41 All of these matters suggest that while Belizean criminal justice might appear to be a bridge-disfavoring factor at first glance, the manner in which the system actually works encourages organized crime.

Furthermore, rather than firmly adhering to a rule-of-law ideal, the Belizean legal system has continually overlooked the transgressions of elites. Citizens of influence have infrequently been arrested and even more rarely prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to prison terms. On various occasions officials have ignored rumors or allegations that prominent people have committed crimes. For their part, elites have sometimes compensated, strong-armed, or otherwise persuaded underlings to shoulder the blame for them. Although Belize has one of the most vibrant and deeply entrenched democracies in the region, such antidemocratic norms have undermined efforts to combat crime and have invited elite participation in lucrative transnational criminal activities. Not only have these problems aided cartels looking to transship drugs smoothly through the country, but they have helped to fertilize the soil within which domestic drug organizations could sink their roots and grow into formidable entities in their own right.

The difficulties that kinship ties and compartmentalized operations have posed for counternarcotics institutions with weak intelligence capabilities have been compounded by the fact that all law enforcement in postcolonial Belize has been severely underfunded. At one point, with the government encouraging more police patrols by foot and bicycle in Belize City, officials acknowledged that police there had been restricted by a monthly gasoline quota of forty gallons per vehicle per month. Because a police car patrolling all day might use fifteen to twenty gallons, many vehicles were grounded early in the month.42 The situation was no better at sea. In 1997 a senior official reported of drug enforcement in the south: “We have no boats. We have raised this with the ministry, but so far all we can do is concentrate on what happens inland. And if we get things, the maintenance is expensive and we have no money. . . . Yes, there are people making fortunes mysteriously. . . . Yes, there is more violence as drug trafficking increases. But we are doing what we can, and that is not much.”43

Population Flows

During that typically difficult transition period that follows independence for formerly dependent states, Belize has also had to contend with serious regional problems that spilled over into its territory. In this regard, cross-border population flows, one significant aspect of the regional civil wars and of globalization more broadly, have also contributed to drug trafficking. Illegal immigration into Belize triggered jumps in population from 120,000 in 1970 to 205,000 in 1993 to 266,000 in 2003.44 From independence on, the country, long viewed as a lightly populated oasis of peaceful stability in Central America, has had to contend with refugees escaping from conflict in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua and with economic immigrants from those countries and Mexico and Honduras as well. Democratic Belizean society, predominantly English speaking and marked by sociopolitical values akin to the British Caribbean Islands, has had to absorb, at least temporarily, scores of poverty-stricken, Spanish-speaking, undocumented immigrants, many fleeing from far more violent and authoritarian cultures.

These intraregional population migrations have hampered assimilation and contributed to unemployment and the rise of gangs, to petty and serious crime, and to overburdened health, education, and penal systems.45 With jobs scarce, some of these immigrants have become deeply immersed in the drug trade—growing and trafficking cannabis and providing protection and enforcement as hired muscle for marijuana and cocaine networks.46 Indeed, numerous foreigners involved in the Belizean drug trade have been killed after deals went sour. In commenting on the double murder of refugees who had been trying to buy marijuana seeds, a Belizean journalist wrote, “The story . . . is depressingly familiar. Bodies are discovered, drugs are involved, nobody is ever arrested, tried, or convicted. Most of the time they involve aliens from Guatemala, Mexico, and Salvador.”47

The transnational movement of people affected Belize in another way as well. Tens of thousands of Belizean economic immigrants have moved north to the United States, and communities of expatriate Belizean Americans have risen to forty thousand in Los Angeles alone. Communities of fairly recent immigrants, perhaps especially those in urban areas, tend to be both poverty-stricken and reluctant to cooperate with police, factors that contribute to their playing key roles in the import and dealing of drugs.48

Some Belizeans, transplanted to urban areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, and Washington, D.C., have become involved in gangs and drug distribution.49 This has resulted in an increasing stream of criminals being deported to their native country, who have then used their experiences abroad within Belizean gangs.50 The process of emigration and repatriation has also led to a widening network of Belizean contacts within the world’s largest drug market. In recent years gang activity has resulted in Belize repeatedly setting and then eclipsing national murder records, and by 2010 the per capita murder rate had reached nearly forty per one hundred thousand citizens, with U.S. officials noting that most were gang related and many narcotics related.51 The population flows often identified as a salient feature of globalization have thus amounted to yet another bridge-favoring characteristic.

International Cooperation

Flawed international cooperation that might have done more to check drug transit has been a final significant factor encouraging Belizean drug trafficking. Here, the country has stood out among its neighbors as being at once a part of and distinctly separate from the remainder of Central America. In light of Guatemala’s long-standing claim to its territory and the presence of a garrison of British troops even after independence, some in the region have seen the very existence of Belize as depending on foreign intervention.52 Indeed, its British cultural heritage and Commonwealth membership have led many Central Americans to consider Belize really to be a Caribbean state. The country has not shared with its neighbors their history of Spanish colonialism and its key consequences: the Spanish language, Catholic religious tradition, civil law legal system, and centralized corporatist political model. Consequently, at first, other Central American governments routinely excluded Belize from their gatherings.

Reflective of this state of affairs, Belizean independence did not immediately translate into extensive multilateral activity. Not until 1991, for instance, did Guatemala recognize Belize to be an independent state, a pivotal step in the country’s bid for membership in the Organization of American States, which occurred that same year.53 And, within a region in which effective counternarcotics cooperation has occurred infrequently, Belize at first forged few links with neighboring police forces.54 Relations with Guatemala have customarily been strained and sometimes downright hostile, and thus joint antidrug initiatives have occurred rarely with this neighboring state, vitally important to regional trafficking.55 With a small handful of exceptions, collaborative efforts to curb trafficking were at first largely confined to bilateral undertakings and agreements with Mexico, Great Britain, and the United States.56

Here, the bilateral antidrug moves between Belize and the United States have been by far the most significant. In the 1980s, though at first from headquarters in the U.S. Embassy in neighboring Guatemala, DEA agents operated in Belize, working in conjunction with the Belizean police force and its Serious Crimes Squad. From that time on, the vast majority of significant antidrug seizures and arrests have come through U.S. intelligence, most often tips on incoming shipments passed from the DEA to Belize police. In 1991 the United States and Belize established a Joint Information Coordination Center, later hailed as a prototype.57 A Memorandum of Understanding, followed by a 1992 agreement, authorized the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy to patrol Belizean waters when a Belizean “ship rider” was aboard or when hot pursuit of suspects led into territorial waters.58 This culminated in additional U.S. financial support for the BDF Maritime Wing.59

Notwithstanding these bilateral ties, only in the late 1990s, fully a decade and a half after drug transit started to climb, did Belize begin to participate in significant multilateral antidrug undertakings. After years of resistance, Belize opted in 1996 to sign the 1988 United Nations Drug Convention.60 Three years later, Belize hosted an international drug-enforcement conference. Thereafter, increasingly, Belizean officials have attended and even taken leadership positions in related multilateral forums.61 Yet, though cooperation had certainly intensified by the turn of the century, drug routes and networks had already become firmly established. The year 2000 brought new extradition and mutual legal assistance treaties with the United States as well as expanded overflight privileges.62 By 2002 Belize had become a full-fledged member-state on the Permanent Central American Committee on Anti-drug Activities, and the following year the government initiated a series of anticorruption seminars, funded by Canada, and held a national, OAS-sponsored, anticorruption conference.63 In 2005 Belize joined the Cooperating Nations Information Exchange System, sponsored by the U.S. Army Southern Command, which has assisted in tracking and intercepting suspicious aircraft. Some significant bilateral cooperation has also started to occur in drug cases involving Mexico, Colombia, or Guatemala, leading to a handful of successes.64

The crowning point here is that cooperative police efforts that Belize has shared with its neighbors and North American and European states have been too few and started too late to meet the law-enforcement goal of choking off cocaine transshipment. Indeed, counternarcotics relations with the United States have suffered rocky periods, during which drug trafficking and corruption became even more entrenched. In assessing the record of international cooperation, one might point out that postcolonial societies often have sensitivities with respect to relations with larger powers that more established states may feel less acutely. In this respect, Belize has certainly faced starkly different circumstances than has a country like Costa Rica, long independent and newly developed, with legislative and judicial systems that for many years have functioned relatively smoothly, at least by regional standards.

In contrast, in their first several decades of independence, Belizeans have had a weak and inadequately funded law-enforcement system with poorly trained personnel; a court system in which prosecutorial assistance has been spread far too thin and that has relied on inexperienced lay magistrates, some of whom have been corruptible; and a shoddy penal system, crowded with inmates, that long featured antiquated facilities and has been run by outnumbered and underpaid officials. In short, confronted with an enormous number of competing priorities that have often stymied effective antidrug efforts, Belizean officials have had to try to contend with the extraordinary stress test that wealthy criminal syndicates have posed for the country’s institutions, with very few budgetary resources at a very challenging period in national history. Under these circumstances, urging by U.S. diplomats and law-enforcement officials to take on additional tasks, to cooperate more extensively, and to function more effectively was likely to raise tensions on occasion. In any event, while certain useful counternarcotics links and institutions have been established between the United States and Belize, a robust Belizean drug trade has developed despite the resources offered and joint efforts launched.

The Evolution of Drug Trafficking in Belize

From at least the 1960s, when the country first produced high-quality marijuana for export, moving drugs out of Belize has been the most prominent aspect of the country’s underground economy. And, although the vast majority of the marijuana exported from Belize has been homegrown, the occasional export of Guatemalan or even Panamanian marijuana has also occurred.65 Dealing in contraband has a lengthy history in Belize among elites as well as other classes. To some Belizeans, perhaps drawing on cultural traits that stretch back to colonial times, marijuana smuggling has not been a wholly disreputable occupation but has been viewed instead as a profitable undertaking that also evades, circumvents, or ridicules state authority.66

By the late 1980s, however, the Belizean drug trade was definitely evolving toward significant cocaine transshipment, supplemented in the 1990s by the very occasional passage of heroin. With the increasing transit of harder drugs and such evident consequences for society as soaring crime rates and crack-cocaine abuse, many Belizean citizens have lost their prior tolerance for trafficking. Nevertheless, by then domestic marijuana production had already laid the groundwork for Belize to become a prominent bridge state in the cocaine trade. In this respect, the Belizean experience has differed from that of all the other Central American states.

The Marijuana Trade

Successful drug-eradication efforts in one country, it has been observed, frequently lead to additional drug-production problems in another.67 In this regard Mexico’s extensive marijuana- and opium-suppression campaign, known as Operation Condor, cut that country’s share of the U.S. marijuana market from more than 75 percent in 1976 to less than 10 percent in 1980.68 This, in turn, created opportunities for others. In Belize not only had cannabis long been grown, but by the 1980s it was being produced virtually throughout the country.69 In 1985 Belize police chief Maxwell Stephens noted, “We are twice the size of Jamaica, sparsely populated, and well watered. . . . This is ideal for marijuana cultivation.”70 As early as the 1970s high-quality varieties of Belizean marijuana, under such labels as Belize Breeze, had gained an international reputation for potency, with THC levels reaching 11 percent.71 Not only did Belizeans have a valuable product to export, but Belize was much closer to the U.S. marijuana market than was Colombia. This proximity has been particularly advantageous for smugglers, because marijuana is the bulkiest drug to transport, a fact that increases the likelihood of its interdiction and raises costs and risks.72

Just after the country completed its transition to independence, these various factors led to a stage of extremely large-scale marijuana production in Belize, as fig. 2.1 illustrates. Indeed, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (BINM) estimated that in 1984 the yield of the Belizean marijuana crop had reached 1,053 tons. As fig. 2.2 demonstrates, only a relatively small amount was consumed domestically, and of the remainder, 85 percent was exported to the United States and 14 percent sent to other countries, including Mexico.

Fig. 2.1 Marijuana production in Belize, 1982–1990

Sources: INCSR (1993), 145; INCSR (1992), 133, 135; INCSR (1989), 116; INCSR (1985), 42–43.

Note: After 1991, with international attention focused more single-mindedly on cocaine and heroin, the U.S. government noted in annual drug reports that the amount of cannabis being cultivated in Belize was unknown.

The Belizean marijuana industry long capitalized on the country’s lack of integration. Producers recruited illegal aliens to tend fields, typically located in quite remote areas, such as the jungles along the Guatemalan boundary or bordering the New River south of Orange Walk.73 Indeed, the New River zone has witnessed continuing violence, including numerous clashes between rival growers.74 The unevenly populated northern Orange Walk district and the Red Bank region south of Dangriga also became noted for considerable cannabis production. In contrast to the enormous, extensively fertilized and irrigated marijuana plantations that authorities discovered in rural Mexico at this time, Belizean marijuana farmers traditionally planted plots of about a hectare, or roughly two and a half acres, hidden in the jungle or within fields of legitimate crops.75 As a U.S. government report noted, Belizean marijuana “is normally grown using the slash-and-burn technique of clearing fields. A grower employed by a trafficker will hike into a remote jungle area, hack out a plot, burn the debris, and plant marijuana. After the crop matures, he harvests and delivers it to the trafficker.”76

Fig. 2.2 Marijuana yield and exports from Belize, 1982–1990

Sources: INCSR (1990), 167; INCSR (1991), 136.

Note: The estimates of Belizean and U.S. authorities differed a bit, disagreeing, for instance, on whether the best estimated yield in 1986 was 550 or 605 tons, and in 1987, 198 or 220 tons. See “Belize Bucks Regional Trend in Drug Production,” TR (BZ), 27 March 1988, 12, and “‘Drug Problem Is Alarming,’ Says PRIDE Director,” BT (BZ), 17 December 1989, 3, 27. The differences were not marked, however, and a high-level U.S. official with responsibilities in Central America declared, “The statistics in the [Belizean] newspapers on crop eradications and crop seizures appear to us to be fairly accurate. Belize is too small a country for the statistics to be misleading and no one to suspect [it]. The statistics match up pretty well with computer programs tracking drugs coming from Latin America.” Confidential interview, 1990.

As in the Colombian marijuana industry, small, hard-to-locate plots minimized risk.77 When authorities might need to hike for much of a day to reach a cannabis field previously identified from the air, those cultivating the site were often forewarned and fled. Although arrests linked to marijuana production occasionally occurred, these tended to snare unwary individuals hired to guard or plant small plots. In part because the poverty-stricken farmers involved have often been viewed sympathetically, neither the Belizean legislature in passing drug laws nor the courts in sentencing offenders have seriously penalized marijuana production. Cannabis has frequently been grown on public land, and when fields turned up on private holdings, owners have routinely disclaimed all knowledge. In fact, absentee owners might be collecting substantial fees to permit marijuana production; however, with their strictly limited investigative resources, authorities have found this difficult to prove. And, lacking a strong rule-of-law tradition, officials have usually been disinclined to pursue elites when marijuana has been found on their land. Thus, apart from the peons caught tending marijuana fields, those involved in cannabis production have rarely faced prosecution, much less conviction and serious penalty.78

On the national scene, although no strong movement has ever coalesced to legalize growing and trafficking marijuana, whether stamping out enhanced production would become a top government priority immediately after independence was unclear. At the time other pressing tasks and problems occupied politicians. Some appreciated the foreign exchange and employment that the marijuana industry delivered, and a number were beholden to the trade, either corrupted by it or cognizant of its influence within the communities they represented. Moreover, the chief marijuana organizations have traditionally been headquartered in northern and southern Belize. Law enforcement there has been even more erratic than in central Belize, with the influence of elites, kinship networks, and patron-client relationships exceptionally strong. And, some doubted whether an unintegrated new state lacking financial resources and robust institutions could counter marijuana traffickers very effectively.

The economics of the marijuana trade proved to be nettlesome as well. By the early 1980s, even as sugar profits slumped, Belizean intermediaries paid producers fifteen to thirty dollars a pound for marijuana and then charged foreign syndicates fifty to a hundred dollars per pound when it was packaged and prepared for export. Cannabis could be harvested in both the fall and spring, and it eventually helped support numerous small farmers.79 In addition, those who could furnish airstrips, weapons, laborers, aviation fuel, mechanical skills, and alike skimmed considerable sums from the trade.80 In 1985 one Belizean citizen commented, “Almost everyone you meet in this country is at least tangentially involved in the marijuana trade. Most never see the stuff. But they may rent a plane or an airstrip to someone. Or a truck. They may lease out some land or ignore someone’s use of it.”81 In fact, with Belize ranked as the fourth largest exporter of marijuana to the United States, its annual crop was estimated in the mid-1980s to be worth $350 million, a figure more than triple the country’s $111 million in legal exports.82

Nevertheless, within two years of independence, the government had moved decisively to stem the trade. The prime incentive involved the country’s bid to cultivate positive U.S. relations. To gain enhanced foreign assistance, Belizean officials felt that marijuana production had to be curtailed. Determining the best strategy to do this, however, proved problematic. As one outside consultant put it, “Destruction of the marijuana by personnel on the ground [was] thought to be prohibitively slow, expensive, and dangerous.”83 By contrast, spraying weed killer from the air was markedly more effective, but also considerably more controversial.84 In the first year of spraying, starting in 1982, officers of the BDF Air Wing flew two loaned U.S. crop dusters and destroyed about 85 percent of the crop. Furthermore, U.S. authorities seized certain sizable marijuana shipments that Belizean traffickers had managed to export. For instance, in 1983 U.S. Customs officials hid a transponder on a Cessna 404 airplane; tracked from Belize to New Mexico, it contained 1.1 tons of marijuana.85

It has been theorized that increased antidrug law enforcement often has the effect of “cartelizing” a drug industry.86 That is, enhanced eradication and interdiction adversely affect the smaller and less-capable traffickers first, thwarting or eliminating them and strengthening their larger, better-organized, more influential, and often violent competitors, who gain market share. This dynamic occurred in Belize. While more vulnerable rings—small Belizean or U.S. operators exporting marijuana—fell during law-enforcement campaigns, the most entrenched Belizean drug organizations carried on. These were primarily headquartered in Orange Walk in the north and Big Creek in the south, and they capitalized on their connections not only to continue to export marijuana but to diversify to cocaine transshipment.

Thus, major Belizean drug rings persevered, despite the government’s antimarijuana campaign. In 1983 the country’s cannabis production rose to an estimated seven hundred tons, and though authorities eradicated almost six million marijuana plants, growers then doubled the acreage planted, while aggressively irrigating and fertilizing to improve yields.87 Many in Belize objected vigorously to the aerial-eradication campaign—largely funded by the United States but including some support from Mexican helicopters and crews—arguing that the spraying occurred haphazardly or hampered legitimate activities.88 While marijuana producers and exporters may have engineered certain complaints, others appeared to be genuine and troublesome. Belizeans in widely scattered settlements declared that crop dusters were releasing weed killer where no marijuana plantations existed, harming fruits and vegetables, fish and animals.89 During the early years of heavy aerial spraying, the Belize Honey Producers Federation commissioned a study by an American entomologist that linked the widespread application of weed killer dropped by planes on or near marijuana fields to beehive damage and slumping honey production.90

At the end of 1983 the government halted aerial spraying, with authorities then relying solely on search-and-destroy missions on the ground. Yet manual operations destroyed a much smaller percentage of the crop. The estimated thirty-five tons exported in 1983 approached and then exceeded a thousand tons the next two years. Judith Bertini, DEA chief of operational intelligence, noted that the 85 percent exported to the United States would supply 8 percent of the U.S. market.91 Indeed, a U.S. federal district court concluded that in about the last half of 1984, a single marijuana-trafficking organization, led by Randall Garrett, succeeded in importing into the United States more than three tons of Belizean marijuana.92

Certainly, government policies regarding the marijuana trade interested numerous Belizeans and, hence, could have resounding political impact. The People’s United Party (PUP) administration of George Price had initiated aerial spraying, but by the 1984 election year it was embattled on corruption charges, and leading PUP politicians concluded that further air eradication was politically untenable. In fact, many Belizeans at this time were prepared to tolerate fairly extensive marijuana use and trafficking. One estimate suggested, conservatively, that about ten thousand Belizeans smoked it; another postulated that between ten and thirteen tons of Belizean marijuana were consumed domestically each year. Furthermore, a widespread perception existed that prior spraying had occurred on a politically selective basis, with marijuana going untouched so long as it was situated on land owned by PUP supporters.93

Behind-the-scenes struggles within the Price government illustrate just how interrelated were personal, national, and international interests with respect to drug issues. Certain cabinet members, including Elijio “Joe” Briceno, an influential Orange Walk politician then serving as minister of energy and communication, opposed aerial eradication. With time, hidden motives behind Briceno’s political stance came to light. In 1984 a DEA special agent learned that Briceno, responsible for supervising airports, traffic, and communications, was also involved in the drug trade. Indeed, Briceno met the agent and offered to store and supply high-quality marijuana, to provide a clandestine airstrip for marijuana exports, and to ensure that police not interfere. He even arranged for visiting pilots, in reality undercover DEA agents, to tour possible runways that might accommodate DC-3 planes. Briceno eventually promised to deliver two thousand kilos of marijuana a month in exchange for a 10 percent commission on sales. In April 1985 Briceno flew to Miami to collect more than thirty-two thousand dollars in seed money. After meeting with undercover agents at the Columbia Hotel and discussing security arrangements and the price and availability of marijuana in Belize, Briceno was arrested. Eventually convicted of conspiring to import marijuana and cocaine, among other charges, he was sentenced to seven years in prison and a fine of fifty thousand dollars.94 While this incident ended Briceno’s political career, his son eventually launched a political career and in recent years has risen to lead the People’s United Party.

By the mid-1980s a DEA official called drug trafficking “more significant in Belize than in any other country in Latin America,” in light of its modest population and economy.95 While an overstatement given developments in Colombia and elsewhere, numerous Belizeans were quite attracted to the potential remuneration associated with the drug trade.96 With corruption rife, trafficking occurred blatantly. Planes touched down on the principal highways or even at the international airport without eliciting an official response. An informant pilot testified in a U.S. federal court case that in 1983 he had landed at the Belize airport to find trucks loaded with marijuana guarded by an American trafficker and several local residents armed with automatic weapons. In describing how the marijuana trade permeated life in Belize, an airport baggage handler placed the constant drug smuggling in sharp perspective: “Big plane land here, pick up dope. Big plane land in highway, pick up dope. Everybody getting rich but the little people.”97

In fact, although light planes exported most Belizean marijuana during the heyday of production, traffickers also shipped considerable quantities by sea. At its widest, Belizean territory is about sixty-five miles across, so marijuana need not be transported far to reach the coast. This, coupled with such attractive features of offshore waters as the barrier reef and its cayes, encouraged maritime marijuana trafficking.98 In one case that eventually brought about the conviction and resignation of corrupt U.S. federal district judge Robert F. Collins, American Gary Young pled guilty to charges that in 1985 he had conspired to send a maritime delivery of more than 1.1 tons of Belizean marijuana to the United States.99 Then, in the late 1980s U.S. prosecutors exposed a network that had been sending thousands of kilos of Belizean marijuana from Misteriosa Bank off Rocky Point Lighthouse, near Sarteneja, toward Marco Island, Florida.100 In 1990 combined British-U.S.-Belizean maritime operations interdicted fully 7.89 tons of marijuana.101 Whether sent by air or sea, the constant marijuana exports developed capable Belizean drug rings that came to operate quite skillfully, frequently outfoxing authorities by changing routes.

On the national scene, despite having halted the antidrug aerial-eradication program, the PUP lost the 1984 election. The incoming, more conservative United Democratic Party (UDP) administration and prime minister Manuel Esquivel soon confronted renewed U.S. pressure concerning marijuana exports.102 In 1985 Esquivel declared, “The cultivation and trafficking of marijuana has been converted into a serious problem that threatens the country’s security.”103 The UDP government then agreed in principle to resume aerial spraying, though it temporarily refrained from doing so, awaiting the results of U.S. legal proceedings that had challenged the government-sanctioned spraying of paraquat as harmful to the health of marijuana smokers.104 At length, Belize opted to use Roundup, and after a period of limited measures, the government ordered full spraying to resume in 1986.105 Not only did the renewed campaign destroy more than 2.2 million kilos that year and 2.7 million the next, but the government also embarked on a much-publicized effort to use explosives to destroy some of the most suspicious unlicensed airstrips.

These measures, coupled with drought, took a considerable toll on the Belizean cannabis industry, and marijuana production declined steeply from 1986 to 1990. Fig. 2.1 illustrates that, while much more marijuana was cultivated in 1986 than at the beginning of the decade, much more was eradicated as well. Thus, after 1985 exports steadily fell, with eradication reducing the amount available to be shipped abroad from 512 tons in 1986 to 48 tons in 1990. George Price and the PUP then took office again and opted to retain the UDP’s fundamental eradication policies, resulting in a further decrease to 36 tons in 1991. By 1992 the U.S. government declared that by cutting marijuana production 90 percent over five years, Belize had suppressed cultivation to the maximum extent possible.106

Despite these considerable setbacks, Belizean drug networks did not discontinue all efforts to export marijuana. Eradicating fields of cannabis failed to disrupt the long-lived, well-connected, and historically successful domestic networks that had been financing, producing, and transporting the drugs. The attraction of the trade persisted, as did the routes, infrastructure, international connections, and consumer demand that had supported their operations. In 1987 Prime Minister Esquivel observed that so high was foreign demand, traffickers were actually bartering cocaine for Belizean cannabis.107 In addition, significant Belizean producers relocated operations into Guatemala’s El Petén region and substantial quantities of marijuana began to cross the Guatemalan border.108 Nevertheless, while curtailing drug production in one country did lead to enhanced output in its neighbor, the overall result was a decrease in marijuana production in this corner of Central America.

The next noteworthy development occurred in 1994 when, in a cost-cutting measure, the U.S. government removed its spray planes from Belize. This left the BDF Air Wing to attempt to identify marijuana fields and send in ground units to eradicate the crops. Although the United States was prepared to return the planes the following year, the Belizean government chose, on environmental grounds, not to initiate a new spraying campaign, seeking instead to continue aerial reconnaissance and manual eradication. Thus, destruction of cannabis fields by hand became, once again, the centerpiece of the Belizean campaign to curb the marijuana trade.109 After eradicating a mere 12,700 plants in 1994, Belizean authorities took out nearly 300,000 in 1997, and over 200,000 and 270,000 in the following two years.

In response, marijuana farmers tried to confound the authorities with various tactics. Some turned to fast-growing varieties of indica marijuana, which could mature in four months or fewer. Many worked to hide their crop better by interplanting corn stalks with the cannabis plants or by employing the “underbrush method,” in which they cleared low-lying vegetation for cannabis cultivation but retained larger trees to screen fields from detection. Growers also took advantage of the Belizean climate, especially its regular and plentiful rainfall, planting cannabis seedlings and then leaving them until harvest.

Thus, some cannabis cultivation, transit, and export persisted.110 Moreover, even as the industry declined, particular large shipments were still prepared for export, with few repercussions for local traffickers. In 1986 police operating on the outskirts of Belize City discovered that a large shipping container, marked “Empty,” actually contained more than 3.5 tons of compressed marijuana. Businessman Jaime Perdomo was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to a $37,500 fine.111 In 1990, after authorities at Belize City Port searched another shipping container bound for Miami, marked “Empty” and yet holding more than 1.6 tons of marijuana, two Mennonite businessmen were arrested, but later acquitted, and no one else was held responsible.112 Similarly, in 1998 authorities discovered 3 tons of compressed marijuana in another supposedly empty shipping container that had brought imported goods to a Mennonite community and was then trucked around the Orange Walk district before being returned to the Port Authority shipping compound.

This record suggests a number of points. To the surprise of many onlookers, significantly curtailing the Belizean marijuana industry was not a hopeless undertaking. Belizean yields and exports did taper off substantially from the enormous crops of the early to mid-1980s, a testament to national eradication efforts. U.S. and Belizean officials hailed the curbing of the Belizean marijuana trade as an example of highly effective national antidrug actions, stimulated and supported by U.S. aid. However, just as Belize increased its market share with the Mexican antimarijuana campaign of the late 1970s, so Guatemalan producers gained ground as the Belizean yield fell. Even more important, to a much greater degree than occurred in any other Central American state, the extensive export of homegrown cannabis had developed organizations, infrastructure, and know-how in Belize that could be applied to the transit of South American narcotics. Whether antidrug successes against marijuana could be duplicated very much remained to be seen.

The International Trade in Narcotics

Even as the government of Belize trumpeted what had indeed been an impressive campaign to thwart the domestic marijuana industry, a far more serious problem grew rapidly in scope: the transit of cocaine shipments headed from South America toward Mexico and the United States. It soon became apparent that as official pressure on the domestic marijuana industry had crescendoed, various prominent Belizean drug networks had shifted into cocaine transshipment. In retrospect, while successes in eradication and interdiction played the most important part in stemming Belizean marijuana exports, another key factor was the aim of Belizean organizations to increase their earnings by trafficking even more profitable drugs.

The most arresting fact concerning the evolution of the Belizean drug trade is how significant prior marijuana trafficking was in preparing for later cocaine transit. Although a U.S. federal court once noted, “Marijuana and cocaine are different drugs in terms of sources, channels of distribution, methods of shipment and processing, and customers,” this general principle does not accurately encapsulate the Belizean experience.113 Here, drug organizations adapted for use in cocaine smuggling the very routes, methods, and logistics first developed in moving marijuana. Colombian, American, and Mexican cocaine traffickers found well-oiled export machinery in Belize, as well as a plentiful supply of experienced potential collaborators. The existing drug-smuggling infrastructure thus abetted the sweeping transformation of the Belizean drug trade.

As for the characteristics of the Belizean networks involved, a U.S. intelligence report stated, “Most Belizean trafficking organizations are small, tightly knit groups, and their members often are related. A trafficker often divides a large cocaine shipment among several smaller groups to transport it, thus minimizing his risk. Some organizations act solely as support teams to refuel aircraft and go-fast boats, or to transport cocaine overland.”114 Colombian cocaine cartels that had learned of successful marijuana export from Belize paid top dollar to use the same airstrips and networks of collaborators. For instance, a 1992 U.S. federal court case identified Frederick Pou as both a source of marijuana in Belize and an intermediary arranging refueling stops in Belize for aircraft traveling between Colombia and the United States.115

For Belizean traffickers the transition from marijuana to cocaine smuggling often occurred incrementally, rather than as an abrupt switch. In diversifying their operations, various Belizean organizations at first dabbled in moving cocaine. In the 1970s and 1980s some helped to transship very modest amounts of the narcotic, while still mostly concentrating on marijuana exports.116 A few helped to transport much larger cocaine loads. Indeed, U.S. court records reveal that from at least the late 1970s notable cocaine shipments periodically transited the country. For instance, Claude Griffin, a marijuana and cocaine trafficker who eventually turned state’s evidence, described for U.S. authorities three cocaine flights in 1982 that proceeded from Colombia into Belize for refueling and then on to Raceland, Louisiana, carrying a total of 600 kilos of cocaine.117 In general, however, over a period of many months, for one group after another, cocaine transshipment increased as marijuana smuggling diminished.

For that era, the transport of hundreds of kilos amounted to striking cocaine-trafficking ventures. In using Belize as an intermediate stop for flights in small planes, such smugglers did not normally off-load the drugs to be stored or forwarded via another method; instead, they simply refueled and continued north into Mexico or directly into the United States. One ring, broken up by authorities in Miami in 1984, was transshipping cocaine from Colombia right through Belize International Airport. There, with protection from airport and police officials, refueling occurred, prior to an onward flight into Florida.118 Indeed, by the early 1990s various U.S. federal court cases showed cocaine being transported by air from Colombia through Belize and into the United States.119 One prominent network, headed by Richard Lynn, smuggled numerous loads of more than six hundred kilos of cocaine into the southern United States via Belize. In 1988, after police in Marion, Alabama, interrupted a cocaine transfer, authorities captured two of the ring’s pilots, who eventually opted to become government informants. At trial, the pilots testified that in 1987 and 1988 they had often flown to Colombia and returned to the United States after refueling in Belize.120

In fact, since the first substantial Belizean cocaine seizure did not occur until 1990, more can be learned about the country’s early cocaine trafficking by examining U.S. court records. Indeed, to this day, most cocaine-transshipment schemes involving Belize have come to light through seizures abroad, and detailed information about prior successful transshipment ventures have frequently emerged from the testimony of police, informants, and others at foreign trials. This, in turn, reflects the fact that Belizean authorities soon discovered that curbing cocaine transit was a far more difficult challenge than curtailing marijuana production. A cannabis field offered an immoveable target that could be identified, sometimes with foreign technological assistance, approached by air or ground, and expeditiously dealt with. In contrast, opportunities to intercept cocaine were fleeting and required better intelligence and more nimble responses. The Colombian and Mexican cocaine networks have also been considerably more dangerous—more wealthy and sophisticated, more adept at wielding bribes and intimidation, and more violent and paranoid—than were the U.S. marijuana-trafficking rings that they supplanted.121

In conjunction with this growing trade, the 1980s also witnessed mounting cocaine consumption within Belize and the advent of crack-cocaine markets. The DEA reported,

Cocaine first surfaced in Belize in 1985, when an airplane laden with cocaine from Colombia crash-landed in the Orange Walk District in northern Belize. Several local drug traffickers stole the cocaine and sold it locally. Seeing the potential profits . . . some marijuana traffickers changed their operations to the more profitable business of working with Colombian groups to import cocaine . . . for further transshipment to the United States. The cocaine flow into Belize increased along with local abuse of crack cocaine. . . . Several known Belize traffickers own or control airfields and support drug flights by providing fuel and security for which they are paid in cocaine by international traffickers.

The development of domestic cocaine markets, in turn, furthered the growth of urban gangs and drug-related violence, although it also enhanced the commitment to curb trafficking by some Belizean authorities.122

As the Medellín cartel rose to dominate the cocaine trade, their leaders looked to Belize as a particularly promising bridge state. The former key transportation strategist for the Medellín cartel, Carlos Lehder Rivas, originally tipped to certain of the country’s bridge-favoring characteristics by an imprisoned American doctor familiar with the country, targeted Belize as ideal to manipulate through bribes and violence.123 A close past associate later testified that Lehder had planned to “take over” Belize and turn it into a criminal paradise.124 Toward that end, the Colombian kingpin hoped to appeal to Belizeans on ideological grounds, while intimidating authorities and thoroughly corrupting institutions, all to enable the regular transit of large cocaine shipments.125 This was a formula he had already employed in another recently independent, postcolonial, formerly British state—the Bahamas.126

Although Lehder was arrested in 1987 in Colombia and extradited to the United States, Medellín traffickers had already initiated plans to ship cocaine through Belize, with Police Commissioner Bernard Bevans noting in early 1988 “a great upsurge in drug trafficking.”127 At a mid-1989 press conference U.S. Ambassador Robert Rich declared, “A major narcotic network built on the groundwork of the languishing marijuana trade and having strong connections with an international drug ring is responsible for the increase in cocaine trafficking and distribution in Belize.”128 The cocaine trade through Belize then climbed rapidly in the following decade. In 1993 U.S. antidrug officials reported of the country, “Intelligence and seizure statistics indicate continuous or even increasing cocaine transshipment. Main routes are by air or sea from Colombia, often with stopovers in Honduras and/or Guatemala, as well as overland to Guatemala. Most major shipments move on to Mexico en route to the U.S.”129

While the initial surge of Belizean cocaine transshipment occurred through the use of small planes, cocaine soon came to be frequently trafficked at sea. In 1992 a U.S. federal court sentenced American lawyer James Timonere to forty-five years in prison and a $1 million fine for shipping 2 tons of Colombian cocaine via Belize into a marina near Dunedin, Florida. The following year, a DEA sting involving more than 900 kilos of Colombian cocaine transported by yacht from Belize led to thirteen arrests and the downfall of a ring that over a decade had imported an estimated 35 to 50 tons of cocaine from around the Caribbean basin into the United States. In 2000 DEA agents in Florida seized 479 kilos of cocaine and uncovered another network, led by a U.S. grandmother, that had also been shipping cocaine from Colombia through Belize into the United States.130

A significant portion of this trade has involved drug ventures that piggybacked on regular intra-Caribbean shipping. Thus, in one typical case U.S. Customs inspectors found nearly 70 kilos of cocaine on the Belize-registered freighter Layenda, after its arrival in Miami from Haiti. At the close of the twentieth century the DEA concluded,

Most of the cocaine transported overland to or through Belize is hidden in containers or concealed in bulk commercial shipments, such as lumber or concrete. Cargo smuggled into Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador via maritime vessels also is shipped overland to Belize or Mexico for onward transshipment. . . . Drug traffickers also transport cocaine through Belize to Mexico via containerized cargo. Belize has two seaports capable of berthing container shipments. A common practice for drug traffickers is to conceal cocaine in fresh fruit and seafood, both regular exports. Vessels transporting food are rarely checked thoroughly by customs due to the perishability of the foodstuffs, and inability of customs to pay for the cargo, should no drugs be found and the goods ruined.131

The next development of signal importance in maritime cocaine trafficking through Belizean waters involved the much more frequent use of speedboats. In the 1990s go-fasts carrying large cocaine loads came up the Central American coast, perhaps via the Islas de la Bahía (Bay Islands) of Honduras, or they headed directly to Belize from the island of San Andrés off Colombia. Alternatively, Belizean speedboats might take to sea to load cocaine brought on a mother ship or dropped by planes. Whatever the route, go-fasts often transited the territorial seas of Belize at night, using the cayes to camouflage their activities further. The DEA reported, “Go-fast boats are refueled and unloaded by support teams, which usually use a different location for each operation. Drug traffickers in Belize are known to rotate their operations from the Northern Districts to the Southern Districts in order to avoid detection.”132

In relation to available maritime counternarcotics resources, Belizean territorial waters are vast. And the scores of cayes on both sides of the barrier reef, coupled with the many coastal swamps and lagoons, have made for a plethora of potential hiding places. Belizean authorities have lacked the boats and fuel to patrol their waters at all thoroughly, with the ocean side of the barrier reef especially neglected, and large U.S. Coast Guard vessels have been more effective in deep offshore waters than in coastal shallows. Hence, as confounding a task as keeping tabs on air traffic in Belize has been, authorities have found it even more problematic to determine what exactly is happening offshore. In particular, small planes have often operated with the disadvantage of entering Belizean airspace flown by foreign pilots with limited knowledge of the country’s landing strips. Furthermore, hiding a plane that arrived early to a rendezvous could be problematic. In contrast, Belizeans intimately familiar with offshore hazards and hiding places and the patterns of local law enforcement have taken charge of trafficking through coastal waters and, on the whole, have managed it quite successfully.

Low interception rates then encouraged more maritime narcotics-transshipment schemes. Over time, while aerial smuggling has still been employed, traffickers have more frequently employed water drops, in which sealed cocaine packages have been tossed into the sea or into lagoons or other bodies of water to be collected by associates. Plainly, the most opportune moment for authorities to capture a loaded plane and its occupants is when they are on the ground. In a properly executed water drop, however, the pilot need not land at all or can touch down for refueling with an empty plane, having already left the drugs some distance away.133 Thus, hybrid aerial-maritime routes using water drops have reduced the arrest of pilots, a highly skilled, expensive asset of drug organizations.

Traffickers operating in Belize have also allied to move drugs more efficiently and outmaneuver authorities. In the mid- to late 1990s Colombian and Mexican cocaine-smuggling networks began to collaborate more closely, and Belize proved to be a convenient intermediate staging point.134 Where the Colombians’ responsibility was to oversee the cocaine shipments out of South America, the Mexicans would take charge of transport into the United States. Belizeans became intermediaries, receiving and then reexporting the drugs. Thus, during this period Belizean associates increasingly warehoused narcotics. The stored cocaine could be exported when buyers were ready, or divided into smaller loads, thus reducing the risk that an entire shipment would be seized.

By 1994, when the UDP and Manuel Esquivel once more ousted Price and the PUP, even more cocaine-trafficking organizations were at work in the country.135 These groups varied substantially in size from Mexican and Colombian cartels, to long-standing Belizean operations, to drug ventures by growing Belize City gangs, to opportunistic enterprises by individuals. As fortunes waned for the Medellín kingpins, Cali traffickers stepped in, markedly intensifying operations that actually dated to the early 1980s.136 Then, when arrests by U.S. and Colombian authorities broke up the Cali cartel, the void was filled by traffickers linked to exceptionally violent competitors: Colombia’s Northern Valley and Mexico’s Juárez cartel.137 By 2000 leading Belizean trafficking groups had assisted various of the principal Mexican and Colombian cocaine syndicates, helping them to transport shipments of many hundreds and sometimes thousands of kilos.

With cocaine supplies readily available and distributors eager for more drugs, Belizean entrepreneurs have entered the cocaine trade as well. Although these smaller operations have not initially been able to finance the purchase and transport of very sizable cocaine loads, kilograms of cocaine have been readily procured, and the successful trafficking of modest quantities has been an effective route toward building capital and contacts. The risk posed by local authorities has been tolerable as well. While U.S., Mexican, British, or Canadian customs and police might uncover small trafficking schemes, Belizean officials have not been especially vigilant.138 Hence, so long as the principals in a Belizean drug ring found others to assume the risks of crossing borders and otherwise operating abroad, they might stay in business for quite some time.

A courier operation set up by Belizean brothers in the mid-1990s exemplifies this variety of trafficking. Authorities alleged that Dwayne, Mark, and Gary Seawall at first used the postal service to move cocaine into Columbus, Ohio. To increase the scope and profits of their undertaking, they turned to offering free vacations and a thousand dollars in cash to dozens of young American couriers, who had to return to the United States wearing shoes with a pound or two of cocaine hidden inside.139 Eventually, the U.S. government requested the brothers’ extradition on multiple charges of trafficking and money laundering, and Dwayne Seawall eventually pled guilty and was sentenced to seventeen years in prison.140 Of course, any single courier engaged in such a smuggling operation would be moving a tiny fraction of the cocaine found in one major shipment. Nevertheless, the activities of such entrepreneurial organizations, regularly sending couriers north, added to the stream of cocaine flowing from Belize.

With time, cocaine smuggling led, in turn, to some heroin transshipment. In 1996 Belizean authorities, assisted by the DEA, made the first seizure.141 By 2000 the DEA determined that, on occasion, Colombian networks were shipping heroin along with cocaine loads, and the next year a number of heroin-trafficking arrests involving Belize occurred.142 In 2005, in the country’s first such case, two Belizean couriers, carrying heroin from Panama, died when the glass test tubes wrapped in latex that they had swallowed ruptured in their stomachs.143 However, Belize was not a renowned international air hub, as Panama was. Belize had only a fraction of the tourist trade of Costa Rica. And, the country was far less suited than Guatemala for opium production, none of which occurred. Thus, for Belize the heroin trade has remained of quite modest proportions.

Instead, in the twenty-first century, a new drug-trafficking threat developed from the passage of large quantities of pseudoephedrine, a decongestant used in manufacturing methamphetamine. Mexico’s Gulf cartel became deeply involved in Central American transshipment of pseudoephedrine, and it had already cultivated excellent contacts in Belize. In October 2009 authorities located a million dollars’ worth of pseudoephedrine in a Belize City house. The following month, the Belize Customs Department declared that the Gulf cartel had threatened inspectors who might uncover pseudoephedrine transshipment. After a Gulf contact in Belize informed Gregory Gibson, comptroller of customs, that his department had been targeted, Gibson declared, “We don’t sleep well at night. Too few people are in the fight and too many people are afraid.”144

As they investigated the pseudoephedrine trade, Belizean Customs officials noted that various trucks, either while in the customs compound or shortly after leaving it, and carrying trailers later suspected of containing pills, had been hijacked and vanished or were recovered empty. It further developed that a shipping container brought to Belize on the Chinese ship Palencia had been irregularly cleared through customs, and investigators came to believe that it had included 10 million tablets of pseudoephedrine. Shortly thereafter, a container off another Chinese ship, Paranga, was found to contain 4.8 million pseudoephedrine pills. The shipment had been consigned to a company called Me Agape, with a Corozal Free Zone office and directors that included prominent Corozal politician Florencio Marin Jr. along with two of his relatives. Me Agape, however, denied all knowledge of the shipping container, and the investigation stalled. By the end of 2009 Belize reported that 423 kilos of pseudoephedrine had been seized.145

While heroin and pseudoephedrine smuggling via Belize has occurred, cocaine trafficking has dwarfed the transit of all other narcotic drugs. In examining the peaks and valleys of cocaine seizures from 1990 to 2010, as illustrated by fig. 2.3, one sees the Belizean state not entirely collapsing in the face of intensive cocaine trafficking but instead displaying a marked pattern in which it periodically reasserted itself in counternarcotics work. In general, however, one should bear in mind that interdicting cocaine being transshipped through the country was not so much a hit-or-miss proposition as one that was mostly misses. Peak years often reflected a single large cocaine seizure, almost invariably the result of DEA information.146 The typical difficulties faced by an emergent society contending with scarce law-enforcement resources grievously hampered counternarcotics operations. In 1998 a diplomat in Belize observed, “They have no radar, they have no helicopters, their air force has three planes, their navy has 50 people and an annual maintenance budget of [about US$25,000] to keep the fleet afloat and patrol more than 200 islands. . . . Their chances of catching anything are pretty slim.”147

The record thus raises grave doubts about the efficacy of an interdiction strategy in Belize. Typically, while Belizean officials have occasionally intercepted drugs, the incapacities of the criminal-justice system have been brought into sharp relief, as authorities have struggled to identify and break up the networks behind the transactions. In light of the significant vulnerabilities of Belizean law enforcement, the magnitude of annual cocaine seizures was often correlated to the state of Belize-U.S. relations.

Belize–United States Relations

Over the years most Belizean administrations have valued a strong relationship with the United States government. Not only has the United States served as the country’s principal trading partner, but U.S. tourists have contributed in increasingly important ways to the Belizean economy. Thanks in large part to its strong democratic traditions, Belize has also frequently led the region in U.S. foreign assistance per capita.148 In turn, U.S. policy makers have normally viewed Belize as a particularly friendly neighboring state. Indeed, although numerous requests occurred, the U.S. government had never lost an application to have a suspected criminal extradited from Belize to the United States, until a technical mishap derailed an extradition bid in 2005.149 Very few states could match that record of international cooperation with the United States in transnational criminal matters.

Fig. 2.3 Cocaine seizures in Belize, 1990–2010

Sources: INCSR (2011), 137; INCSR (2009), 150; INCSR (2008), 154; INCSR (2007), 147; INCSR (2006), 129; INCSR (2005), 160; INCSR (2004), 132; INCSR (2003), 5:4; INCSR (2002), 5:3; INCSR (2000), 154; INCSR (1991), 136; DEA, Resources, Belize (2003), 3; DEA, Resources, Belize (2000), 1.

Nevertheless, just as drug transshipment via Belize climbed in the mid-1990s, Belizean interception rates and other counternarcotics work fell precipitately, straining Belize-U.S. relations. In 1995 the U.S. government bluntly declared that the government of Belize “does not give high priority to anti-drug efforts.” In an unusually frank interview the following year, U.S. deputy chief of mission Gerard Gallucci told the media, “Belize is essentially uncontrolled territory. It is possible for drug traffickers to work with almost complete impunity. . . . The allure of Belize as a staging area for cocaine transfers has become great.” In 1997 the Clinton administration notified Congress of the Belizean government’s lackluster performance in countering the drug trade, stating, “Narcotics are transiting the country with little resistance.” Assistant secretary of state Richard Gelbard cited inadequate seizures, high-level corruption, mismanaged investigations, and the failure to prosecute high-profile defendants. The State Department noted that Belizean traffickers were collaborating with Mexican organizations to transship Colombian cocaine to the United States and that the ability of Belizean officials “to combat them was severely undermined by deeply-entrenched corruption, which reaches into senior levels of government.”150

Such critical comments emerged during the annual process through which the U.S. Congress has compelled the State Department to certify those countries cooperating in antidrug endeavors. Since denying Belize certification might threaten multilateral development bank funding supportive of democracy and development, the administration opted to invoke the national-interests exception. And U.S. criticism did prompt significant Belizean action aimed at raising interception rates. Later in 1997 Belizean officials organized and financed Operation Ides of March, through which seizures of 1,323 and 1,083 kilos helped to set an annual confiscation record.151

U.S. pressure, followed at first by Belizean denials and resistance and then by additional antidrug efforts, thus played into the larger process observed in various Central American bridge countries in which a state, confronting the wealth and power of transnational drug networks, retreats, persists, and at length reasserts itself in relation to the illicit global economy.152 In Belize, the 1998 elections then brought to power a new PUP administration, which publicly ranked “combating narcotics trafficking and associated crime as a top priority,” increasing the prospects for more sustained national antidrug efforts.153 By March 1999 the U.S. government was again certifying Belize as cooperative.154 More bilateral counternarcotics initiatives ensued, with the new extradition treaty coming into force in 2001, a mutual legal assistance agreement in 2003, and a Caribbean antidrug accord the following year.155

Certain tangible results followed renewed U.S.-Belizean cooperation. In 2001 Belizean authorities granted permission to the U.S. Navy to board the Belizean-flagged vessel the Zvesda Mardu, off the Mexican coast, leading to the seizure of twelve tons of cocaine, at the time the largest maritime cocaine bust ever recorded.156 Yet the underlying problems that made Belize such an attractive bridge state remained unaddressed. In 2004 U.S. counternarcotics officials complained, “After five years in power, the People’s United Party continues to advocate combating drug trafficking and associated crime as a top priority, but avoids providing the appropriate units with resources.” They noted that an array of U.S. intelligence sources active in the narcotics field continued “to gather increasing evidence and information pointing to the fact that the [government of Belize] suffers from serious corruption problems at all levels.”157

Thus, although U.S. pressure influenced the priorities of the Belizean government and stimulated increased cooperation, it did not dramatically alter Belize’s place within the multipolar system of Central American drug trafficking. While occasional busts and arrests have occurred, foreign and domestic law enforcement efforts within Belize have yet to stem the flow of hard drugs for a sustained period. Although the U.S. government has provided particular useful resources—computers, a coast guard vessel, refurbished speedboats—such assets did not lead to steadily increasing interception rates, nor did they alter the fundamental institutional weaknesses that prevented more effective counternarcotics campaigns from being launched.

Drug-Trafficking Routes and Organizations in Belize

As Central American drug transit climbed, foreign and domestic criminal syndicates used an array of routes to try to slip drugs past Belizean authorities. Although the drug trade eventually touched virtually all parts of the country, the five most prominent centers of activity were Belize City, the Guatemalan border and western Belize, Orange Walk in northern Belize, Big Creek in southern Belize, and Ambergris and the other Belize cayes. Examining them illuminates how and when the marijuana and cocaine trades enveloped much of the country and spotlights certain of the principal actors.

Belize City

Long maligned by its critics for its inadequate sewage and extensive petty crime, while hailed by its supporters for its rakish tropical charm, Belize City has traditionally stood as the country’s largest urban area and chief port. The city’s flaws have been well chronicled: “the destruction of periodic tropical storms, overcrowding, narrow streets, open sanitary sewers, poor health conditions, inadequate water supply, continual subjection to insects, rats, pests, invasions of land crabs, extreme heat, and high humidity.”158 Nevertheless, by the 1990s Belize City, located just north of the midpoint of the Belizean coastline, contained nearly fifty thousand residents, or roughly a fifth of the population. After observing that Belize City inhabitants “are not in an easy position to obtain any kind of wealth,” one scholar noted that “much of the population . . . gains its income mainly from informal opportunities.”159 Unsurprisingly, as Central American drug-trafficking increased the city swiftly became a vital drug-transshipment hub.

In words strikingly applicable to Belize and Belize City, one authority has written of narco-criminality in Caribbean states, “Drug barons, dons, . . . ‘bigmen,’ and international entrepreneurs all have connections with government, commercial houses, and political party bosses. Overlapping, vertically-integrated chains of patron-client relationships, ripple throughout society connecting top to bottom, eventually to the unemployed, disaffected youth who hustle, scrap, scuffle, retail, and kill each other.”160 By the early 1990s serious gang activity, fueled by international cocaine trafficking and a booming domestic crack-cocaine market, very much plagued Belize City, particularly its poverty-stricken south side. While Rastafarians and others had long dealt marijuana, the more lucrative local crack distribution stimulated deadly competitive contests.161 Furthermore, for at least the past two decades, gangs have provided muscle for international trafficking ventures, while increasingly participating in moving drug shipments, at first largely within the city’s vicinity and then much farther afield over time.162 Foreign connections of Belizean gangs have also involved members in distribution abroad, and, with time, certain gang leaders have risen to international prominence in the drug trade.163

For many years significant drug loads have transited right through Belize City, either via air, over land, or through speedboats, small freighters, or coastal fishing and supply vessels. One striking trend has been the ever-larger individual shipments involved. A U.S. federal court case in 1964 detailed marijuana smuggling inside foot lockers.164 By the mid-1980s typical trafficking in central Belize involved luggage or boxes containing at most 100 or 200 kilos of marijuana, directed through the port or airport.165 Eventually, cocaine transshippers adopted the very paths through the Belize City area once established by marijuana smugglers.

As these routes proved successful, drug syndicates utilized them for bigger shipments. In a key drug case in 1988 the Serious Crimes Squad found about 5.5 kilos of cocaine at a motel just outside of Belize City.166 Two years later, authorities intercepted nearly 190 kilos of cocaine just north of the city; discovered flight plans, cash, and another 55 kilos in a city hotel; and broke up a Miami-based operation involving Colombians, Hondurans, and Belizeans.167 In 1991, 273 kilos of cocaine slipped past the authorities when a plane transiting the country landed for refueling at the municipal, not the international, airport.168 Over the next two years cocaine smugglers sent into Belize from Honduras on commercial airliners a series of 100-kilo shipments inside filters for hot-water heaters.169 In 1995 the Belize police confiscated 650 kilos of Cali cartel cocaine, hidden in the ceiling of a city apartment.170 Considerable rhetoric followed, with promises of tougher enforcement and joint Belize-U.S. law-enforcement missions. In 1996, however, the smell of drugs so thoroughly overcame a U.S. counternarcotics canine unit, sent to Belize City’s central port buildings, that the dogs suffered from sensory overload and had to be pulled out of the warehouses!171

Two leading twenty-first-century cocaine-trafficking cases, one centered on a foreign trafficker, another on a Belizean, illustrate both the growing magnitude of drug-transshipment operations through Belize City and notable characteristics of this dimension of the Belizean drug trade.

Jorge Torres Teyer

In 2001 Belizean authorities stumbled onto Jorge Torres Teyer, alleged to be, since 1995, the Mexican trafficker in charge of transshipment through Belize for the Southeast cell of the Juárez cartel.172 On the run from Mexican police Torres had gained Belizean citizenship for fifteen thousand dollars just eight days before his arrest. He was initially brought into custody after police stopped him for driving the wrong direction on a one-way street in Belize City, and the trafficker attempted to bribe the officers with cocaine. After further inquiries, authorities conducted a predawn raid that netted 1,532 kilos of cocaine at an apartment complex just north of Belize City, which led, in turn, to the arrest of Torres, three other Mexicans, and a Belizean.173

The network’s modus operandi involved speedboats dispatched from Colombia as well as larger Colombian vessels that off-loaded Medellín cocaine shipments, usually of about 1,500 kilos, to smaller Belizean boats. After entering Belizean territory, the drugs were next directed toward the small Mexican town of Calderitas, just north of Chetumal on the Yucatán coast, for shipment on to the United States. The drug ring included Belizeans Liston McCord, a former senior patrol officer of the Fisheries Department with extensive knowledge of Belizean territorial waters, and George Enrique Herbert, who owned a boat-building business and, over time, had developed extensive Mexican and Colombian connections. Herbert was also deeply involved with one of the country’s most violent gangs, the George Street Crew of Belize City.174

Most “chilling” in the view of the U.S. federal judge who oversaw his trial were Torres’s handwritten instructions to the boat captains he employed: “If purported customers did not give the correct password, they should ‘shoot them all and kill them.’ Similarly, if those claiming to be customers did not deliver the appropriate amounts of money, in correctly colored suitcases handed over in the previously agreed sequence, Torres instructed his subordinates to ‘kill them all.’” This was, indeed, an extensive and extremely violent criminal network.

According to Mexican investigative journalists, Torres also masterminded a stolen-car ring in Chetumal, working with Belizean partner Harold Sheran to supply to Belizean elites luxury cars, outfitted with false vehicle identification numbers. Sheran may also have been linked to the drug trade, as authorities searching his ranch found aviation fuel, a thirty-one-foot Mexican skiff, and sophisticated radio-communication equipment. In 2001 gunmen in a convoy of vehicles with tinted windows suddenly arrived at the Belizean farm where Sheran was staying, abducting him and his brother-in-law as well as a farm assistant and his wife. All disappeared without a trace, with the kidnappers overlooking only a Salvadoran cook, hiding on the premises. That same day, unknown assailants in Chetumal strangled Sheran’s wife to death. This rash of violence is typical of the settling of accounts that has regularly occurred within and between drug-trafficking organizations in Central America.175

Prominent Medellín trafficker Mauricio Ruda Álvarez reportedly supplied much of the cocaine to the Torres network, and, at length, this collaboration turned violent as well. In 2002 Ruda, suspicions aroused by a stolen cocaine shipment, reportedly ordered George Herbert to be seized. Four gunmen, armed with assault rifles, kidnapped Herbert at his Belize City office. A boatyard employee witnessed the assault and followed in a high-speed chase that eventually two police cruisers joined. After a shoot-out that injured one officer, the kidnappers tried to force Herbert onto a boat on the Belize River, but he dove into the water and eluded capture. Some weeks later, Ruda himself was murdered, his corpse found stuffed in a car trunk in Medellín. Within two months of Torres’s arrest, the headless corpse of David Reyes, reportedly an informant in the case, bobbed up in the Belize River. This, then, resulted in the suspension of two other police officers, since Reyes had been enrolled in a clearly ineffective police-protection program.176

Although Belizean authorities held Jorge Torres Teyer for trial for many months, it became increasingly clear that the legal system was unlikely to successfully prosecute, convict, and securely imprison such a prominent Mexican trafficker. According to the country’s leading newspaper, at a court appearance in April 2002, Torres smirked when chief magistrate Herbert Lord postponed the trial on grounds that a court interpreter had turned out to be “unavailable” on account of sickness. By the following month, not only had the trial been adjourned twice for lack of translation services in a largely bilingual country, but charges had been dropped against McCord, in whose van much of the seized cocaine had been discovered. Then, in July Lord suddenly announced that in light of the illness of Bernard Pitts, former chair of the Belize Bar Association and a prominent lawyer handling the case, the trial would again be adjourned, not resuming until September. The Reporter recounted that the courtroom then rocked “with mirth” as the “not-so-sick Pitts walked into the courtroom to be informed by the Chief Magistrate that the trial was being adjourned because of his sickness.”177

In August, after Belize officials were tipped that Torres planned to use explosives to break out of Hattieville Prison, they gave up on the prosecution, instead deporting the trafficker forthwith to the United States. At his U.S. trial Torres eventually pled guilty to conspiracy to import cocaine, as did various accomplices, and he was sentenced to serve thirty-eight years in prison.178 A U.S. federal court concluded, “The evidence easily supports a finding that Torres Teyer’s activities involved the importation of 15,000 kg, maybe more.”179 George Herbert and Mexican colleague Víctor Manuel Adán Carrasco received terms of thirty-four and a half years and twenty years, respectively, while Liston McCord was sentenced to ten years.

Robert Hertular

Another notable Belize City trafficker was Robert Hertular, who, with his brother, joined Herbert in the George Street Crew.180 Not only does his career further illustrate the involvement of Belize City gangs in weighty cocaine shipments, but it demonstrates their international ties, influence within Belize, and ongoing efforts to corrupt and intimidate domestic and foreign officials.

Although over the years Hertular had numerous encounters with the Belizean police force, including arrests for forgery and shooting at a patrol car, he was never confined to prison for any lengthy term.181 Authorities finally developed a solid case when DEA information led to a 2001 cocaine raid on a warehouse, uncovering more than 580 kilos of cocaine and producing the arrest of Hertular and four others. Information gained during interrogation led to a follow-up raid in Ladyville, just north of Belize City, where police found 570 kilos in an empty lot next to the Hertular family home. Both loads were thought to be en route to Mexico. Further U.S. investigations revealed that Hertular had dealt with both Mexican and Colombian traffickers. Indeed, the kingpin eventually admitted that he had arranged these and four other shipments, totaling more than 5 tons of cocaine, through his “personal friend” Carlos Castaño, leader of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC).182

Released on $125,000 bail, Hertular then surprised Vincent Williams, who directed the DEA office at the U.S. Embassy in Belize, by calling the agent’s unlisted personal cell phone number to suggest a meeting. The two met, and Hertular admitted to transshipping large quantities of cocaine via Belize by sea and air, with the assistance of various high Belizean officials. He also presented to Williams a VHF radio and satellite phone that he claimed had been used to coordinate a recent cocaine shipment. The DEA, however, chose to decline Hertular’s offer of additional information in exchange for leniency.

In 2003, as the Hertular case proceeded through the Belizean court system, Williams was conducting surveillance at a DEA confidential informant’s house when Hertular arrived. The informant later reported that Hertular told him that a DEA car was outside and demanded to know whether he was cooperating with the U.S. government. When the informant denied it, Hertular ordered him to get rid of the surveillance. The gang leader offered hand grenades and then said he could do the job himself. When the informant rejected these “drastic options,” Hertular left. Shortly thereafter, he and Williams confronted one another in a nearby parking lot, with Hertular declaring that he was tired of the DEA and the U.S. Embassy and was willing to kill an agent or other official, presumably to intimidate the authorities and short-circuit the case against him.

By the end of 2003, however, the DEA and federal prosecutors in New York were building a major cocaine-trafficking case against Hertular. As evidence was being assembled, the trafficker called DEA agent Raymond Kelly, recently assigned to Belize, again using an unlisted cell phone number. Perhaps to illustrate his extensive knowledge of counternarcotics personnel operating in Belize, Hertular suggested that he and Kelly meet near another DEA agent’s residence. When Williams and Kelly met the Belizean trafficker, Hertular stated that he knew all about the impending U.S. legal action. After Kelly denied that an indictment was forthcoming, Hertular told him that his organization had tapped DEA’s telephones, both landline and cellular. To prove it, he played a tape recording of a conversation between Kelly and a confidential informant regarding the alleged involvement of a senior Belizean official in the drug trade. Hertular also told the agent that he had sources within the U.S. Embassy providing him information, including the identities of DEA informants.

After raising again his offer of cooperation with the United States in exchange for dropping the federal indictment, Hertular revealed that for sixteen years he had participated in a Belizean organization that trafficked drugs and laundered money and, he alleged, was led by past and present officials at the very pinnacle of the government. Hertular told the agents that if they did not back off their investigation, he would have to protect his interests, and he claimed that his network would not hesitate to support him by hiring Colombian or Mexican hit men to kill them.183 Once again, however, the DEA agents turned Hertular down, opting instead to proceed with the case against him.

In 2004 a New York grand jury indicted Robert Hertular on charges of narcotics trafficking, obstruction of justice, and forcibly impeding and attempting to intimidate a federal officer. Within three weeks Belizean officers had arrested Hertular. In most Central American countries the rendition of a national citizen accused of international drug trafficking would be extremely difficult to accomplish. At the least, it would be highly controversial. And yet, in another example of Belizean-U.S. cooperation during a period of normal relations, Hertular was swiftly extradited and in 2006 found guilty at a jury trial.184 A federal appellate judge who had reviewed the case later observed, “The trial evidence convincingly demonstrated that in the period between 2001 and January 2004, Belizean national Robert Hertular conspired with others to import more than six tons of cocaine into the United States.”

Western Belize

Drug rings operating in Belize City have relied on all of the city’s legitimate activity to mask smuggling, while taking advantage of the poverty, gangs, and local drug markets as well. Traffickers operating outside of the city have frequently exploited the country’s lack of national integration, directing transshipment toward out-of-the-way places: vacant coastlines and jungle clearings, swampland and solitary farms and ranches, infrequently traveled roads and distant inland lagoons and other waterways. Not only is much of western Belize quite remote, but this is a fluid border region: Belize shares with Guatemala a 165-mile boundary, and with Mexico, a 155-mile boundary.185

Among the handful of notable urban areas in western Belize, San Ignacio is a small city located in the Mountain Pine Ridge foothills of the Maya Mountains, approximately twenty miles west of Belmopan and near the midpoint of the country’s boundary with Guatemala. Once a quiet center for cattle farming and various trades in the Cayo district, San Ignacio long played a modest part in marijuana trafficking, with some cannabis being grown locally, especially in the hills and jungle south of the city.186 With time, the cocaine trade reached San Ignacio: by the 1990s crack houses had sprung up.187 Then in 2010 alleged major Guatemalan trafficker Otoniel Turcios Marroquín, found to be quietly living with his family in San Ignacio, was arrested and expelled to the United States.188

In fact, networks exporting and importing drugs had long capitalized on the porous border region. As Belizean eradication efforts increased in the 1980s, considerable marijuana came to be imported from Guatemala’s vast El Petén region, flanking the Cayo district.189 Along the border, logging tracks and other dirt roads cut through the dense tropical forest, approaching and even crossing the boundary. In this area marijuana has been smuggled into Belize in vans stolen in Guatemala or, during the rainy season, in four-wheel-drive vehicles.190 In March 1991, for instance, Belizean police confiscated 924 and 1,160 kilos of marijuana from a van and a hiding place off a Cayo district road, then in the succeeding two months authorities stopped three vehicles in the San Ignacio vicinity, seizing 1,711 kilos of marijuana in one and a total of 1,063 kilos in the other two, all imported from El Petén.191

While Belizean traffickers for a time are likely to have imported tons of Guatemalan marijuana into Belize undetected, some cannabis and much cocaine came to flow in the opposite direction as well: from Belize into Guatemala. In fact, as Central American transshipment surged, both Guatemala and Mexico emerged as key stepping stones toward the U.S. drug market. Thus, small communities on Belizean borders, such as Blue Creek Village, across the Río Hondo from La Unión, Mexico, and Arenal and Benque Viejo del Carmen, facing Guatemala, became deeply entangled in the drug trade.192 In 1991 the leading Belizean newspaper reported, “La Unión, a deceptively sleepy village perched on a curve of the Río Hondo, has become a major contraband port. At nighttime the river becomes a bustling waterway for all types of contraband, ranging from whiskey and television sets to diesel and gasoline motor fuel. On the outflow Belize exports cocaine and marijuana.”193 Eventually, though to little avail, the Mexican government tried to pressure Belize to stem the flow of Colombian cocaine from Orange Walk into Mexico via La Unión.

In truth, traffickers in western Belize could capitalize on the spotty international cooperation noted earlier. If joint police work between Belize and Mexico left much to be desired, the outlook for cooperation with Guatemalan officials was nothing short of dismal. As Guatemalan politicians disputed with Belizean counterparts over territorial claims, counternarcotics authorities rarely shared information, and the countries’ respective border patrols much more frequently clashed with one another than joined forces against drug rings active in this zone. Hence, on those rare occasions when authorities have come upon smugglers, they have often simply fled across the boundary to avoid capture.194 Equally problematic, Belizean traffickers have sometimes tried to insulate themselves from possible murder charges by employing foreign hit men, whom the Belize police have found much more difficult to identify, trace, arrest, and prosecute.195 In 1998 senior superintendent Malicio Uk of the Police Intelligence Unit, Special Branch, reported that Belizean drug organizations had been employing Guatemala’s Mano Negra gang as enforcers: gunmen had been contacted in Guatemala and provided with information and a plan; they had then carried out the hit, collected compensation, and returned home. A key lesson here is that transnational organized crime thrives where politics inhibit cross-border police work.

Furthermore, Belize and Guatemala were interdependent in the sense that drug-trade developments in one often deeply affected the other. In the 1990s Guatemala established itself as the preeminent Central American cocaine-transshipment target, with efficient domestic trafficking organizations employing well-established routes into Mexico and the United States. Hence, once cocaine reached Guatemala, the vast bulk proceeded north to the U.S. market. Thus, unsurprisingly, the same pattern identified elsewhere in the country—cocaine trafficking succeeding that of marijuana—marked the evolution of the drug trade in this Cayo district.196 At the same time, however, cocaine loads that doubled back into Belize have not only supplied local drug markets but varied drug-smuggling patterns and in that way helped traffickers to evade official detection.197 Thus, while cocaine has primarily flowed in a northerly direction, a countercurrent has passed through the region around San Ignacio.

Northern Belize

Although central and western Belize have played notable roles in developing the marijuana and cocaine trades, the northern region has long eclipsed them. Historically, northern Belize was closely tied to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. In the mid-nineteenth century the British supported the revolt by Yucatán natives against the colonial government, and during the long fighting in the Caste War (1847–1901), British Honduras provided refuge for people fleeing the Yucateco Army trying to reimpose the governor’s authority. Indeed, these very Mexican refugees helped to settle Ambergris Caye as well as much of the Corozal and Orange Walk districts, and family and commercial links to the Yucatán have been maintained ever since.198

It has often been hypothesized that free trade policies encourage drug smuggling, although extensive supporting evidence is less frequently offered. The situation in northern Belize, however, is certainly one case in point. This region depends on the Yucatán for much of its imports and exports. Chetumal, the capital of Mexico’s Quintana Roo state and a city of 120,000, has long been a Mexican “free port,” and the Belizean government eventually designated Corozal, the closest town to the northern border and the third largest in Belize at eight thousand inhabitants, a commercial free zone as well. These development policies increased border traffic, easing the challenge of masking illicit goods within the flow of legitimate commerce. The key drug connections in northern Belize have joined Belizean traffickers with counterparts in Chetumal, a leading drug-transshipment center. Indeed, as early as the 1980s a steady traffic of couriers, planes, and vehicles had started to export drugs from northern Belize into Quintana Roo. With Mexican traffickers having thoroughly penetrated the U.S. market, a sizable slice of Belizean marijuana exports and a significant portion of transshipped cocaine traveled north into the Yucatán overland or by sea.

Drug-trafficking organizations capitalize on a sense of futility among officials, which as in this customs post, leads directly to lack of effort as well as to corruption. Encouraging vigilance among poorly compensated and undertrained officials is a common problem afflicting border customs officials across the region. On the Belize-Mexico border, customs authorities at Santa Elena have been lax, earning long-standing suspicions of corruption. However, dedicating scarce resources to improving drug interdiction at the border has seemed futile, when anyone wishing to avoid the officials could select from scores of remote crossings that had no controls whatsoever.199 Once again, severe budgetary constraints have hampered counternarcotics policies, while the impossibility of trying to seal off borders has demoralized officials.

Reflective of considerable overland drug export, villages neighboring Corozal, including San Pedro, San Narciso, and Chan Chen, gained reputations as trafficking centers.200 In a typical 1986 case, customs officials at Santa Elena intercepted an American and two Belizeans attempting to export to Mexico 137 kilos of marijuana.201 The following year Corozal police discovered a storehouse holding 569 kilos of marijuana.202 As cocaine trafficking took hold, law enforcement discovered increasingly large quantities being moved through far northern Belize. Thus, where authorities found 212 kilos of cocaine being stored in villages near Corozal in 1992, nine years later they located fully 1,161 kilos near Carmelita.203 It may be that when confronting a porous border with no choke point through which drug shipments must be funneled, antidrug operations aimed at uncovering storage sites near the border may produce more seizures than trying to redouble efforts at lackluster, corrupted, or frequently bypassed customs posts.

Also at the northern extreme of Belize, the towns of Sarteneja and Consejo became notable drug conduits. Perched on the tip of a remote and swampy peninsula just across Chetumal Bay from Mexico, Sarteneja is easily reached by water or air, although authorities might take three hours or more to traverse the forty-mile road from Orange Walk. This tiny settlement exemplifies the remote Belizean settlements, far off the tourist track and historically dependent on subsistence fishing, which have been especially vulnerable to the drug trade. Early on, Sarteneja came to serve as a drug-trafficking hub, with authorities regularly discovering drugs, paraphernalia, aviation fuel, and suspect boats and planes.204 Despite the settlement’s very small population, notable busts elsewhere in the country have frequently included the arrest of its residents.205 In the late 1980s the suspicious activities of one Colombian alien living in Sarteneja included a hidden compartment in his vehicle, reported airdrops onto his property of a white powder the man claimed was screwworm medicine for what turned out to be a nonexistent cattle herd, and the unauthorized bulldozing of a concrete barrier the government had erected to prevent planes from landing on the nearby airstrip. Although these incidents led to the Colombian’s deportation, trafficking through Sarteneja continued to climb, with occasional large busts interspersed with regular suspected visits by drug planes, including one in October 2010.206

Consejo is also well suited for trafficking ventures: on the coast at the end of a road angling northeast from Corozal. Speedboats can cover the fifteen miles to Chetumal in twenty-five minutes. In a representative 1996 case a light Colombian-registered aircraft attempted to land on the Corozal-Consejo road. Although the BDF, tipped by the DEA, was poised to intercept, a collaborator hidden nearby fired two shots to warn off the pilot. When authorities discovered the plane, crash-landed in Sarteneja, they located more than 368 kilos of Cali cartel cocaine, although the pilot and the remainder of the load had disappeared.207 Two police officers, members of the Corozal Quick Response Unit, were strongly suspected of involvement in this and other suspicious incidents, including one in which authorities in charge of a highway drug checkpoint seized one of the officers’ cars, after a wild chase in which the occupants fled into the bush. Although the vehicle contained five kilos of cocaine and thirty-four thousand dollars, chief magistrate Herbert Lord acquitted the officers for insufficient evidence in a “dramatic and unexpected outcome,” according to the country’s leading newspaper. A follow-up police inquiry also failed to assemble a convincing case against the men.208

While Corozal, Sarteneja, and Consejo were part of the drug trafficking machinery in northern Belize, drug organizations in the inland city of Orange Walk have traditionally been the engine driving the trade. About forty miles northwest of Belize City and twenty-five miles from the border, it long functioned as the seat of a sizable marijuana production and export trade. Although the country’s second-largest city, Orange Walk contained a mere twelve thousand inhabitants, according to the 1993 census. Nevertheless, it emerged as such a vibrant center of cocaine consumption and transshipment that the U.S. government termed Orange Walk “the leading area of drug activity in Belize.” U.S. dollars were said to circulate more freely than Belizean dollars, and the Belize Times lamented the city’s many prominent citizens imprisoned in the United States or Mexico on narcotics charges.209

In the 1980s small airplanes frequently landed around Orange Walk to be packed with marijuana, much of it grown nearby, and flown on to the U.S. market. Indeed, marijuana smugglers carried on their operations so brazenly as to delay traffic on district roads, including even the Northern Highway, while drug planes landed, loaded, refueled, and took off.210 Although the government erected large poles along the shoulders of favored stretches of roads, smugglers routinely avoided or destroyed them.211 In a representative 1988 case, one evening patrolling police spotted a twin-engine Cessna plane that had touched down on a secondary road north of Orange Walk.212 As they approached, the plane took off, but the police seized abandoned vehicles nearby, including a pickup truck containing nearly three hundred kilos of compressed marijuana. Two members of the locally prominent Campos family were soon arrested, with media reports indicating that Fortunato Campos had left his passport in a car found at the scene. Several months earlier, authorities had accused Urbano Campos of bribing police and the BDF to ignore another drug plane landing in these environs, to which the DEA had tipped the Belizean government. Although suspicions persisted that the Campos family had been involved, the authorities failed to compile evidence sufficient to prove that any family member had participated in these cases.213

Certainly, drug networks extensively employed numerous clandestine airstrips in the Orange Walk vicinity, relying on foreigners as well as local residents, usually heavily armed, to guard them.214 Typically located within large or quite isolated farms and ranches, the runways were often surrounded by jungle or dense crops such as corn or sugar cane. In 1988 a Belizean newspaper observed, “The tall cane fields make a perfect cloak for clandestine operations since the aircraft can only be seen during landing and takeoff operations. At all other times the refueling can take place in broad daylight with reasonable secrecy.”215 With business thriving by the mid- to late 1980s, the busiest of these runways could service a half-dozen planes over several days.216

Incidents such as one in 1989, in which British Forces Belize seized a truck near Orange Walk containing 1,453 kilos of marijuana, demonstrate how large were some of the cannabis loads handled by these traffickers.217 Furthermore, DEA information, elicited through undercover work, confidential informants, government witnesses, and wiretaps, exposed rampant drug trafficking and corruption.218 Such sources produce revealing snapshots of significant Orange Walk smuggling operations. For instance, in the early 1980s one farm, known as Rancho Grande, served as headquarters for a marijuana-export business, operative for many years.219 From 1982 to 1984 the network, which came to include a government informant, imported at least five substantial marijuana shipments into the United States.220

Working out of the limelight but at the center of operations that were moving drugs through northern Belize were men like Perry and Paddy Franks, Canadian nationals residing in northern Belize during the 1980s.221 In 1986 authorities broke up their ring when an individual contacted the DEA with information about a marijuana-smuggling conspiracy headed by James Gregory Smith. U.S. officials persuaded the contact to become an informant and then had an undercover agent pose as a conspirator claiming to be able to provide clandestine airstrips and support services. The informant traveled to Chetumal to meet the Franks brothers, who were to supply the marijuana and help arrange the landing site in Belize. Eventually, DEA agents loaded more than 360 kilos of marijuana into their own twin-engine plane and flew it to a Texas airstrip. At an Austin warehouse American conspirators weighed the drugs and were paying off the undercover agent when authorities moved in to arrest them. Shortly thereafter, Mexican Federal Police arrested the Frank brothers in Chetumal for a venture to import marijuana into Louisiana. Mexican authorities then expelled the pair to the United States. A Texas federal court convicted both of conspiring to import marijuana, and Perry Franks was also found guilty of marijuana trafficking into Louisiana.

Over time, more lucrative and violent cocaine trafficking completely overshadowed the earlier marijuana trade in northern Belize. In the mid- to late 1980s Medellín traffickers moved aggressively into Orange Walk, paying top dollar to use its drug rings to assist in forwarding large cocaine shipments.222 Although most of the narcotics escaped interdiction, trafficking ventures were sometimes exposed. Occasionally, DEA informants or undercover operations led to major busts. At other times, local police happened upon crashed aircraft or drugs being stored or transported to an airstrip, or they managed to stop transshipment during vulnerable phases of the operation, such as refueling. In still other cases, foreign authorities seized drugs at their destination and determined that an Orange Walk route had been utilized.223 Thus, in 1989 federal agents in Westchester, New York, seized 2,033 kilos of Medellín cocaine off a plane that had refueled near Orange Walk. The following year authorities confiscated nearly 360 kilos of cocaine after a plane accident at a clandestine airstrip off the Northern Highway.224 In 1991 a suspected Colombian drug plane crashed on another such strip in San Felipe, about fifteen miles from Orange Walk, just after the BDF had partially destroyed a runway.

Through the 1990s cases related to the northern Belize cocaine trade multiplied. In 1991 the DEA used an undercover sting operation to penetrate a Medellín operation that was shipping cocaine into Belize and on for U.S. East Coast distribution. The organization was allegedly led by Pedro Libardo Ortegón Ortegón, identified at trial as “directly below the highest level of the cartel,” and was being assisted by Belizean traffickers led by Armando Grajales of Orange Walk.225 That same year, after a cross-border cocaine deal went sour, a Chetumal kingpin orchestrated a kidnapping of Belizeans.226 In 1992 the DEA and an elite Belizean counternarcotics team captured 212 kilos of cocaine in two villages near Corozal, and in 1995 Corozal police seized a sport-utility vehicle and arrested its two occupants, headed toward the border with 114 kilos of cocaine.227 In 1996 authorities found a rough runway, aviation fuel, and a weapons cache at Revenge Lagoon, on the edge of the Orange Walk district in the wilderness north of Crooked Tree.228

Cocaine transshipment put an even greater premium than had marijuana export on corrupting police and politicians to preclude interdiction. When drug networks operated in remote areas of an unintegrated state like Belize, they might be confident of avoiding official detection without assuming the risk and expense of corrupting authorities. However, in light of the violence freely wielded by Colombian and Mexican cartels, as the size and value of cocaine shipments increased, so, too, did the risk of undertaking trafficking without systematically corrupting counternarcotics officials ahead of time. Hence, evidence of extensive drug corruption in northern Belize increasingly surfaced. For instance, in 1991 a notepad belonging to the pilot of a drug plane captured in this area was found to contain the name, address, and phone number of a Serious Crimes Squad officer with detailed knowledge of antidrug operations and intelligence.229

In another notorious case in 1996 a police car, parked several miles from Orange Walk, was set on fire and burned, destroying documents that reportedly implicated relatives of government minister Elito Urbina in a large drug-transshipment scheme.230 Although the destroyed evidence effectively thwarted prosecution, the U.S. government then canceled the visas of Urbina’s son and son-in-law and raised the case during the 1997 controversy over certification. As for police inspector Lamberto White, responsible for the destroyed vehicle, authorities investigated and suspended him.231 Then, five years after having been compelled to take early retirement, White was arrested in Nicaragua for possessing several kilos of cocaine and numerous Ecstasy pills.232

Over time, trafficking networks operating in northern Belize altered their methods either to perfect techniques or to stay ahead of authorities. By the early 1990s various operators had shifted from ground transport to speedboats and focused aerial delivery on water drops over bays, lakes, and lagoons.Unpredictability in methods as well as routes minimized interception. Thus, after authorities seized 2,700 kilos of cocaine in 1997, for a time Colombian and Mexican organizations reverted to clandestine landings on Orange Walk roads and airstrips. In 1998, as reports of suspected drug flights increased, two senior BDF officers were arrested for allegedly assisting drug planes landing around the Orange Walk district, and one trafficking network was found to have employed heavy construction equipment to widen two miles of road into San Luis village to accommodate aircraft touching down for refueling.233

One example of this trafficking occurred in 2003, when a drug plane landed near Blue Creek Village, an area largely inhabited by Mennonite farmers.234 Several times, the propeller-driven Russian cargo plane appeared but flew away without setting down. Finally, after dark, collaborators on the ground signaled the plane to approach, and five pickup trucks turned on their headlights to illuminate a landing strip. Within forty minutes handlers had removed an estimated 1.8 tons of cocaine that were thought, then, to have crossed the nearby Río Hondo into Mexico, the river there being shallow enough to be readily forded. As this operation occurred, Blue Creek residents repeatedly called the Orange Walk police and politicians, including the mayor. However, no officials appeared until the next morning, twelve hours after the cocaine had disappeared. This case underscores how unintegrated was the Belizean state and how unresponsive its northern authorities tended to be. Despite the logistical problems encountered by the traffickers and the repeated efforts of local people to tip officials, a large cocaine shipment transited without seizure or arrests.

The following year the Anti drug Unit patrolling near San Lazaro village, ten miles west of Orange Walk, received reports of another low-flying airplane. As the plane approached a rough air strip in a cane field, the pilot spotted the authorities and tried to abort the landing. The heavily loaded aircraft did not respond quickly enough, however, and the pilot crash-landed. The six traffickers involved, armed with automatic weapons, then engaged in a fifteen-minute shoot-out with the police. Ultimately, while just over seven hundred kilos of cocaine were seized, all the traffickers escaped, apparently with the help of a circling helicopter, thought to have been sent from Mexico to assist in exporting the drugs.235

Over time, drug syndicates grew even more daring. In 2004 a drug plane undertook a water drop in the busy early afternoon hours, right in the heart of Corozal Bay, in fact, within the town limits.236 Three waiting boats gathered up dozens of packages and sped across the water to Mexico. The police were caught unprepared, and speedy and effective international cooperation with Mexican counterparts failed to materialize. Although authorities intercepted the boats on their return to Belize, the cargo—evidence needed for successful prosecution—had disappeared. Such incidents demoralized law enforcement, while criminal networks gained confidence that counternarcotics operations were unlikely to interfere with their schemes, however blatant.

In 2008 one Orange Walk transshipment ring was so bold as to land a drug plane at about two in the morning right on the Northern Highway.237 Heavily armed masked men dressed in black stopped traffic while a shipment estimated at more than a ton of cocaine was unloaded and a refueling truck carrying 1,200 gallons of aviation fuel serviced the aircraft. Army and police, alerted by an oncoming driver’s cell phone call, rushed to the scene, but, apparently unwittingly, passed the truck heading north packed full of drugs. During the ensuing shoot-out with traffickers carrying AK-47 assault rifles, police shot the driver of the refueler truck, which crashed, and eventually nine other individuals were arrested, although the pilots escaped.

In countries with well-developed criminal-justice systems, prosecutors have used the threat of conviction and lengthy imprisonment to persuade conspirators to provide information in exchange for more lenient treatment. Given the lesser resources and abilities of Belizean authorities, climbing “up the chain” in this manner occurred much less frequently. In this Northern Highway case, too, the government proved to be largely impotent. The Belizean authorities never located the drugs and could only speculate on their probable route out of the country, while those Belizeans who had masterminded the venture were never publicly identified, much less successfully prosecuted.

Juárez Cartel Activities

Mexican cartels, cooperating with Belizean networks, have been behind many of the air and maritime ventures in northern Belize, far overshadowing the Colombian organizations that had moved in during the initial stage of Belizean cocaine transshipment. The most important of the Mexican syndicates came to be the Southeast cell of the Juárez cartel. While Juárez long had a presence in Belize and the Yucatán, its activities here mushroomed in the late 1990s. This illustrates how broader developments within the drug trade often had critically important consequences for Central American bridge states. After the 1997 death of Juárez kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, bloody struggles ensued within and among the principal cartels active in northern Mexico. Feeling intense pressure from the Arellano Félix brothers leading the Tijuana cartel, Vicente Carrillo, Amado’s brother, shifted many Juárez operations into the Yucatán.238

Headquartered in Quintana Roo, the Southeast cell of the Juárez cartel was directed by José Albino Quintero Meraz (“Don Beto”) and former Mexican federal police officer Alcides Ramón Magana (“El Metro”). Before Magana’s 2001 arrest by the Mexican Army, this smuggling ring became one of Mexico’s most violent narcotics networks, dominating the Chetumal and Cancún drug trade. The U.S. government went so far as to direct its consul in Cancún to leave Mexico after his life was threatened.239 Indeed, by 2000 Cancún had become a regional drug center. Servicing the beach resorts out on the peninsula, the city had grown to 750,000 inhabitants, including surrounding slums, and the booming tourist industry provided exceptional opportunities both to launder money and to camouflage cocaine transshipment. The Southeast cell was deeply involved in both, and routes through neighboring Belize gained prominence.

In early 1999 a Mexican federal police report declared that Chetumal traffickers were transporting cocaine for Colombians into northern Belize by air and sea. The narcotics were then being imported into Mexico, either via the Río Hondo or by shipment into nearby ports and oil refineries. The Mexican investigation also revealed that a pair of Belizean police officers in Corozal was assisting passage of the drugs. Most important, the network had support at the top echelons of Mexican politics. It had corrupted Mario Ernesto Villanueva Madrid, governor of Mexico’s Quintana Roo state from 1993 to 1999 and a member of the then nationally dominant Partido Revolucionario Institucional party.240

Villanueva Madrid, who had extensive contacts in Panama linked to the Cali cartel, was on the payroll of the Southeast cell as well.241 His trusted subordinates had taken charge of importing and transporting drugs through Quintana Roo toward northern Mexico and the United States. Juárez traffickers had been provided with official credentials and with access to planes, hangars, and airstrips, as well as with heavy equipment to construct clandestine runways. In exchange, prosecutors later declared, Villanueva was receiving a per kilo kickback. In one incident a small plane carrying cocaine being transshipped from Barranquilla, Colombia, to the United States developed engine trouble. Traffickers reportedly capitalized on the governor’s influence and had the drugs off-loaded and moved up the coastal highway from Chetumal to Cancún. According to witnesses, state police and a judicial police chief accompanied the drug shipment as it traveled overland within Quintana Roo.

This organization eventually succeeded in moving immense quantities of cocaine through Quintana Roo. Authorities came to believe that between 1994 and 2002 it exported hundreds of tons to the United States, and some of this cocaine was transshipped through Belize.242 In fact, a critical break in the U.S. federal case against the Southeast cell leaders came when U.S. government informants at a northern Belize airstrip loaded 550 kilos of cocaine onto an airplane owned by the Quintana Roo governor’s office to be flown into Mexico.