War (1847–1901), British Honduras provided refuge for people fleeing the Yucateco Army trying to reimpose the governor’s authority. Indeed, these very Mexican refugees helped to settle Ambergris Caye as well as much of the Corozal and Orange Walk districts, and family and commercial links to the Yucatán have been maintained ever since.198
It has often been hypothesized that free trade policies encourage drug smuggling, although extensive supporting evidence is less frequently offered. The situation in northern Belize, however, is certainly one case in point. This region depends on the Yucatán for much of its imports and exports. Chetumal, the capital of Mexico’s Quintana Roo state and a city of 120,000, has long been a Mexican “free port,” and the Belizean government eventually designated Corozal, the closest town to the northern border and the third largest in Belize at eight thousand inhabitants, a commercial free zone as well. These development policies increased border traffic, easing the challenge of masking illicit goods within the flow of legitimate commerce. The key drug connections in northern Belize have joined Belizean traffickers with counterparts in Chetumal, a leading drug-transshipment center. Indeed, as early as the 1980s a steady traffic of couriers, planes, and vehicles had started to export drugs from northern Belize into Quintana Roo. With Mexican traffickers having thoroughly penetrated the U.S. market, a sizable slice of Belizean marijuana exports and a significant portion of transshipped cocaine traveled north into the Yucatán overland or by sea.
Drug-trafficking organizations capitalize on a sense of futility among officials, which as in this customs post, leads directly to lack of effort as well as to corruption. Encouraging vigilance among poorly compensated and undertrained officials is a common problem afflicting border customs officials across the region. On the Belize-Mexico border, customs authorities at Santa Elena have been lax, earning long-standing suspicions of corruption. However, dedicating scarce resources to improving drug interdiction at the border has seemed futile, when anyone wishing to avoid the officials could select from scores of remote crossings that had no controls whatsoever.199 Once again, severe budgetary constraints have hampered counternarcotics policies, while the impossibility of trying to seal off borders has demoralized officials.
Reflective of considerable overland drug export, villages neighboring Corozal, including San Pedro, San Narciso, and Chan Chen, gained reputations as trafficking centers.200 In a typical 1986 case, customs officials at Santa Elena intercepted an American and two Belizeans attempting to export to Mexico 137 kilos of marijuana.201 The following year Corozal police discovered a storehouse holding 569 kilos of marijuana.202 As cocaine trafficking took hold, law enforcement discovered increasingly large quantities being moved through far northern Belize. Thus, where authorities found 212 kilos of cocaine being stored in villages near Corozal in 1992, nine years later they located fully 1,161 kilos near Carmelita.203 It may be that when confronting a porous border with no choke point through which drug shipments must be funneled, antidrug operations aimed at uncovering storage sites near the border may produce more seizures than trying to redouble efforts at lackluster, corrupted, or frequently bypassed customs posts.
Also at the northern extreme of Belize, the towns of Sarteneja and Consejo became notable drug conduits. Perched on the tip of a remote and swampy peninsula just across Chetumal Bay from Mexico, Sarteneja is easily reached by water or air, although authorities might take three hours or more to traverse the forty-mile road from Orange Walk. This tiny settlement exemplifies the remote Belizean settlements, far off the tourist track and historically dependent on subsistence fishing, which have been especially vulnerable to the drug trade. Early on, Sarteneja came to serve as a drug-trafficking hub, with authorities regularly discovering drugs, paraphernalia, aviation fuel, and suspect boats and planes.204 Despite the settlement’s very small population, notable busts elsewhere in the country have frequently included the arrest of its residents.205 In the late 1980s the suspicious activities of one Colombian alien living in Sarteneja included a hidden compartment in his vehicle, reported airdrops onto his property of a white powder the man claimed was screwworm medicine for what turned out to be a nonexistent cattle herd, and the unauthorized bulldozing of a concrete barrier the government had erected to prevent planes from landing on the nearby airstrip. Although these incidents led to the Colombian’s deportation, trafficking through Sarteneja continued to climb, with occasional large busts interspersed with regular suspected visits by drug planes, including one in October 2010.206
Consejo is also well suited for trafficking ventures: on the coast at the end of a road angling northeast from Corozal. Speedboats can cover the fifteen miles to Chetumal in twenty-five minutes. In a representative 1996 case a light Colombian-registered aircraft attempted to land on the Corozal-Consejo road. Although the BDF, tipped by the DEA, was poised to intercept, a collaborator hidden nearby fired two shots to warn off the pilot. When authorities discovered the plane, crash-landed in Sarteneja, they located more than 368 kilos of Cali cartel cocaine, although the pilot and the remainder of the load had disappeared.207 Two police officers, members of the Corozal Quick Response Unit, were strongly suspected of involvement in this and other suspicious incidents, including one in which authorities in charge of a highway drug checkpoint seized one of the officers’ cars, after a wild chase in which the occupants fled into the bush. Although the vehicle contained five kilos of cocaine and thirty-four thousand dollars, chief magistrate Herbert Lord acquitted the officers for insufficient evidence in a “dramatic and unexpected outcome,” according to the country’s leading newspaper. A follow-up police inquiry also failed to assemble a convincing case against the men.208
While Corozal, Sarteneja, and Consejo were part of the drug trafficking machinery in northern Belize, drug organizations in the inland city of Orange Walk have traditionally been the engine driving the trade. About forty miles northwest of Belize City and twenty-five miles from the border, it long functioned as the seat of a sizable marijuana production and export trade. Although the country’s second-largest city, Orange Walk contained a mere twelve thousand inhabitants, according to the 1993 census. Nevertheless, it emerged as such a vibrant center of cocaine consumption and transshipment that the U.S. government termed Orange Walk “the leading area of drug activity in Belize.” U.S. dollars were said to circulate more freely than Belizean dollars, and the Belize Times lamented the city’s many prominent citizens imprisoned in the United States or Mexico on narcotics charges.209
In the 1980s small airplanes frequently landed around Orange Walk to be packed with marijuana, much of it grown nearby, and flown on to the U.S. market. Indeed, marijuana smugglers carried on their operations so brazenly as to delay traffic on district roads, including even the Northern Highway, while drug planes landed, loaded, refueled, and took off.210 Although the government erected large poles along the shoulders of favored stretches of roads, smugglers routinely avoided or destroyed them.211 In a representative 1988 case, one evening patrolling police spotted a twin-engine Cessna plane that had touched down on a secondary road north of Orange Walk.212 As they approached, the plane took off, but the police seized abandoned vehicles nearby, including a pickup truck containing nearly three hundred kilos of compressed marijuana. Two members of the locally prominent Campos family were soon arrested, with media reports indicating that Fortunato Campos had left his passport in a car found at the scene. Several months earlier, authorities had accused Urbano Campos of bribing police and the BDF to ignore another drug plane landing in these environs, to which the DEA had tipped the Belizean government. Although suspicions persisted that the Campos family had been involved, the authorities failed to compile evidence sufficient to prove that any family member had participated in these cases.213
Certainly, drug networks extensively employed numerous clandestine airstrips in the Orange Walk vicinity, relying on foreigners as well as local residents, usually heavily armed, to guard them.214 Typically located within large or quite isolated farms and ranches, the runways were often surrounded by jungle or dense crops such as corn or sugar cane. In 1988 a Belizean newspaper observed, “The tall cane fields make a perfect cloak for clandestine operations since the aircraft can only be seen during landing and takeoff operations. At all other times the refueling can take place in broad daylight with reasonable secrecy.”215 With business thriving by the mid- to late 1980s, the busiest of these runways could service a half-dozen planes over several days.216
Incidents
