Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation. Julie Marie Bunck
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