Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation. Julie Marie Bunck
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