Other particular characteristics of the Belizean economy have affected the drug trade as well. For instance, Belize City—far and away the country’s largest urban area—has always tended toward commercial, rather than industrial, pastimes. Historians have described it as serving as an entrepôt port as early as 1815, and again during extensive trade with the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War.16 Traditionally, a small merchant class has dominated the city, whose larger businesses have depended on imports and a handful of exports, such as lumber, citrus, and sugar, subject to considerable price fluctuations.17 While the lack of manufacturing has largely precluded the passage of precursor chemicals, the export-import trade has screened certain trafficking endeavors and provided opportunities for others.
By the 1990s drugs had been found in various of the city’s warehouses, businesses, and hotels. In market countries, stashing drugs awaiting sales has been a particularly risky stage of the drug trade.18 If traffickers within a bridge state relatively near sizable markets could offer reasonably secure storage, this has amounted to a notable bridge-favoring factor. While speed of transit through a bridge state is one variable of interest to trafficking organizations as they determine how much of a drug to send through a country, an additional factor involves another dimension of logistics: whether secure warehousing is available in a bridge state close to targeted consumers.
Finally, with the development of the cocaine trade, money laundering has cropped up more regularly in Belize, involving much larger sums. For instance, in 2007 the suspicions of DEA and Belizean law-enforcement officials were aroused by Moises Cal, former Belmopan politician and ambassador to Guatemala, who was making frequent trips to Guatemala and Panama and had gained expensive assets that seemed out of line with his government salary. On one of his fifty trips into Panama over a two-year period, Panamanian authorities stopped Cal, who was traveling on a diplomatic passport, and found him carrying $500,000 in cash.19 Cal reportedly attempted, unsuccessfully, to bribe the officials with $110,000. In a different laundering incident late the following year, the new Belizean Financial Investigations Unit searched the Belize City residence of a family operating a MoneyGram International business and found $1.5 million in cash.20 By 2009 the U.S. State Department was listing Belize as a major money-laundering state, defined as one “whose financial institutions engage in currency transactions involving significant amounts of proceeds from international narcotics trafficking.”21
Law Enforcement
Drug-trafficking rings have often exploited underfunded and underdeveloped law-enforcement and criminal-justice institutions. In this respect, until 2005 Belize completely lacked a coast guard, much less a navy, relying instead on the Fisheries Department and a tiny BDF maritime division to patrol its territorial waters.22 While Belize has a relatively high number of police per capita, the force has lacked weapons, training, and technology adequate to counter wealthy transnational criminal networks.23 And, on land as well as at sea, authorities have been spread quite thin. By the 1990s they had proven incapable of containing the simultaneous challenges of considerable growing urban violence, much of it tied to youth gangs, and rising rural violence, often stimulated by the influx of poor immigrants. Violent crimes directly linked to the drug trade thus came to permeate the country, as substantial cocaine loads passed through, as local drug markets vastly increased in scope, and as domestic and foreign trafficking organizations vied with one another.
Belize is sufficiently small that authorities, often drawing on outside government support, could fly over, identify, and then eradicate fields of marijuana reasonably successfully, but in many other matters the grip of authorities has been quite tenuous, particularly away from the country’s handful of cities and towns. Postcolonial Belize has been not so much a purposefully decentralized state as one that has yet to be fully integrated. To this day, the country’s infrastructure is poorly developed. Its roads are still narrow, few, and slow. Much of the country remains inaccessible: tropical forest covers much of the interior; swamps and lagoons, the bulk of the coast; thick mangroves, most of the islands. In 1992 Belizean authorities estimated that the country had 140 airstrips serving isolated settlements, and the government’s radar coverage has never extended beyond thirty miles from the Belize City airport.24
As distance from Belize City increases, the reach and efficacy of law enforcement has tended to tail off dramatically. And, for purposes of stemming the drug trade, distance cannot be measured in miles as a bird might fly, but in the time it might take officials to reach a particular location. The coordination of the few police assigned to remote parts of Belize has posed continuing difficulties. Effective oversight and accountability have been infrequent, and officers have sometimes felt more loyalty to local acquaintances, with whom they might share ethnicity, kinship ties, or cultural characteristics, than to officials in far-off Belize City or in the capital of Belmopan.25 The lack of national integration has adversely affected antidrug work, as traffickers have been able to choose from multiple routes in places unlikely to attract much official attention.
It is true that a trip wire of British military forces has long been stationed in Belize, conducting jungle training and other exercises from bases in the country, and for a time soldiers from British bases periodically interrupted drug-trafficking schemes. In the 1980s and early 1990s British forces sometimes assisted Belizean law enforcement with backup and logistics, while supplying radar, helicopters, and explosives to disable unauthorized airstrips.26 In other cases, British forces stumbled upon drug-trafficking activity.27 However, in 1994 the British Forces Belize garrison was largely withdrawn, and by the mid-1990s only small numbers of British military and intelligence personnel remained, which diminished one modest deterrent to transshipment.28
Even more important, the largely undistinguished record of Belizean antidrug operations can be attributed to inadequate resources, competing government priorities, and official corruption that has particularly afflicted the police force, which has been underpaid, few in number, and sometimes outgunned. By 2003 the Belize Antidrug Unit contained only thirty-five officers. While reasonably well armed, the unit has been largely absorbed with crime in Belize City, and it has sometimes been diverted from narcotics duties to contend with other violent crimes.29 Furthermore, an array of fundamental law-enforcement problems, plainly evident at independence, still afflicted Belizean society decades later. In 2009 Harold Crooks, a former leading Jamaican police official, filed a lengthy report, commissioned by the government, that sharply criticized many aspects of the Belizean force. The Crooks report identified “an unrecognized crisis of indiscipline” among the rank-and-file police. It termed case file preparation methods “obsolete,” noting the absence of “formal mechanisms to periodically reopen serious cases.” And it called attention to the deficiencies of sporadic on-the-job training and the absence of effective coordination among agencies and ministries. In singling out the lack of the infrastructure needed to investigate complex organized crime successfully, the Crooks report observed that, rather than developing intelligence on the drug trade, the uniformed antidrug unit simply patrolled in an effort to interdict shipments. What information on organized crime existed, Crooks concluded, was of poor quality, could be accessed only by senior officers, and focused excessively on low-level operatives.30
Although Belizean legal institutions have certain notable strengths, they, too, have been ill-suited for combating sophisticated transnational criminals. In a region marked by many poorly functioning civil law legal systems that have largely failed to prosecute crime openly and expeditiously, the different common law tradition has been deeply rooted in Belize. As elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Nations, the Belizean legal system has featured prosecutors who function extensively in open court rather than penal and investigating judges who operate largely behind closed doors. Furthermore, from independence forward, the country has been able to draw on connections to other Commonwealth states.31 These have helped to shape Belizean law and have buttressed traditions of respect for judges and judicial independence. Of great use for a postcolonial developing society that has lacked lawyers, the British Loan Service has supplied Belize with experienced judges and prosecutors from elsewhere in the Commonwealth, who