kill an agent or other official, presumably to intimidate the authorities and short-circuit the case against him.
By the end of 2003, however, the DEA and federal prosecutors in New York were building a major cocaine-trafficking case against Hertular. As evidence was being assembled, the trafficker called DEA agent Raymond Kelly, recently assigned to Belize, again using an unlisted cell phone number. Perhaps to illustrate his extensive knowledge of counternarcotics personnel operating in Belize, Hertular suggested that he and Kelly meet near another DEA agent’s residence. When Williams and Kelly met the Belizean trafficker, Hertular stated that he knew all about the impending U.S. legal action. After Kelly denied that an indictment was forthcoming, Hertular told him that his organization had tapped DEA’s telephones, both landline and cellular. To prove it, he played a tape recording of a conversation between Kelly and a confidential informant regarding the alleged involvement of a senior Belizean official in the drug trade. Hertular also told the agent that he had sources within the U.S. Embassy providing him information, including the identities of DEA informants.
After raising again his offer of cooperation with the United States in exchange for dropping the federal indictment, Hertular revealed that for sixteen years he had participated in a Belizean organization that trafficked drugs and laundered money and, he alleged, was led by past and present officials at the very pinnacle of the government. Hertular told the agents that if they did not back off their investigation, he would have to protect his interests, and he claimed that his network would not hesitate to support him by hiring Colombian or Mexican hit men to kill them.183 Once again, however, the DEA agents turned Hertular down, opting instead to proceed with the case against him.
In 2004 a New York grand jury indicted Robert Hertular on charges of narcotics trafficking, obstruction of justice, and forcibly impeding and attempting to intimidate a federal officer. Within three weeks Belizean officers had arrested Hertular. In most Central American countries the rendition of a national citizen accused of international drug trafficking would be extremely difficult to accomplish. At the least, it would be highly controversial. And yet, in another example of Belizean-U.S. cooperation during a period of normal relations, Hertular was swiftly extradited and in 2006 found guilty at a jury trial.184 A federal appellate judge who had reviewed the case later observed, “The trial evidence convincingly demonstrated that in the period between 2001 and January 2004, Belizean national Robert Hertular conspired with others to import more than six tons of cocaine into the United States.”
Western Belize
Drug rings operating in Belize City have relied on all of the city’s legitimate activity to mask smuggling, while taking advantage of the poverty, gangs, and local drug markets as well. Traffickers operating outside of the city have frequently exploited the country’s lack of national integration, directing transshipment toward out-of-the-way places: vacant coastlines and jungle clearings, swampland and solitary farms and ranches, infrequently traveled roads and distant inland lagoons and other waterways. Not only is much of western Belize quite remote, but this is a fluid border region: Belize shares with Guatemala a 165-mile boundary, and with Mexico, a 155-mile boundary.185
Among the handful of notable urban areas in western Belize, San Ignacio is a small city located in the Mountain Pine Ridge foothills of the Maya Mountains, approximately twenty miles west of Belmopan and near the midpoint of the country’s boundary with Guatemala. Once a quiet center for cattle farming and various trades in the Cayo district, San Ignacio long played a modest part in marijuana trafficking, with some cannabis being grown locally, especially in the hills and jungle south of the city.186 With time, the cocaine trade reached San Ignacio: by the 1990s crack houses had sprung up.187 Then in 2010 alleged major Guatemalan trafficker Otoniel Turcios Marroquín, found to be quietly living with his family in San Ignacio, was arrested and expelled to the United States.188
In fact, networks exporting and importing drugs had long capitalized on the porous border region. As Belizean eradication efforts increased in the 1980s, considerable marijuana came to be imported from Guatemala’s vast El Petén region, flanking the Cayo district.189 Along the border, logging tracks and other dirt roads cut through the dense tropical forest, approaching and even crossing the boundary. In this area marijuana has been smuggled into Belize in vans stolen in Guatemala or, during the rainy season, in four-wheel-drive vehicles.190 In March 1991, for instance, Belizean police confiscated 924 and 1,160 kilos of marijuana from a van and a hiding place off a Cayo district road, then in the succeeding two months authorities stopped three vehicles in the San Ignacio vicinity, seizing 1,711 kilos of marijuana in one and a total of 1,063 kilos in the other two, all imported from El Petén.191
While Belizean traffickers for a time are likely to have imported tons of Guatemalan marijuana into Belize undetected, some cannabis and much cocaine came to flow in the opposite direction as well: from Belize into Guatemala. In fact, as Central American transshipment surged, both Guatemala and Mexico emerged as key stepping stones toward the U.S. drug market. Thus, small communities on Belizean borders, such as Blue Creek Village, across the Río Hondo from La Unión, Mexico, and Arenal and Benque Viejo del Carmen, facing Guatemala, became deeply entangled in the drug trade.192 In 1991 the leading Belizean newspaper reported, “La Unión, a deceptively sleepy village perched on a curve of the Río Hondo, has become a major contraband port. At nighttime the river becomes a bustling waterway for all types of contraband, ranging from whiskey and television sets to diesel and gasoline motor fuel. On the outflow Belize exports cocaine and marijuana.”193 Eventually, though to little avail, the Mexican government tried to pressure Belize to stem the flow of Colombian cocaine from Orange Walk into Mexico via La Unión.
In truth, traffickers in western Belize could capitalize on the spotty international cooperation noted earlier. If joint police work between Belize and Mexico left much to be desired, the outlook for cooperation with Guatemalan officials was nothing short of dismal. As Guatemalan politicians disputed with Belizean counterparts over territorial claims, counternarcotics authorities rarely shared information, and the countries’ respective border patrols much more frequently clashed with one another than joined forces against drug rings active in this zone. Hence, on those rare occasions when authorities have come upon smugglers, they have often simply fled across the boundary to avoid capture.194 Equally problematic, Belizean traffickers have sometimes tried to insulate themselves from possible murder charges by employing foreign hit men, whom the Belize police have found much more difficult to identify, trace, arrest, and prosecute.195 In 1998 senior superintendent Malicio Uk of the Police Intelligence Unit, Special Branch, reported that Belizean drug organizations had been employing Guatemala’s Mano Negra gang as enforcers: gunmen had been contacted in Guatemala and provided with information and a plan; they had then carried out the hit, collected compensation, and returned home. A key lesson here is that transnational organized crime thrives where politics inhibit cross-border police work.
Furthermore, Belize and Guatemala were interdependent in the sense that drug-trade developments in one often deeply affected the other. In the 1990s Guatemala established itself as the preeminent Central American cocaine-transshipment target, with efficient domestic trafficking organizations employing well-established routes into Mexico and the United States. Hence, once cocaine reached Guatemala, the vast bulk proceeded north to the U.S. market. Thus, unsurprisingly, the same pattern identified elsewhere in the country—cocaine trafficking succeeding that of marijuana—marked the evolution of the drug trade in this Cayo district.196 At the same time, however, cocaine loads that doubled back into Belize have not only supplied local drug markets but varied drug-smuggling patterns and in that way helped traffickers to evade official detection.197 Thus, while cocaine has primarily flowed in a northerly direction, a countercurrent has passed through the region around San Ignacio.
Northern Belize
Although central and western Belize have played notable roles in developing the marijuana and cocaine trades, the northern region has long eclipsed them. Historically, northern Belize was closely tied to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. In the mid-nineteenth century the British supported the revolt by Yucatán natives against the colonial government, and
