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
