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
