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
