Belize Caught in Middle of Drug War

The big guns of anti-narcotics enforcement--officials from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Colombian police intelligence and the Mexican federal police--gathered quietly last month in this muddy jungle capital.

Central America’s youngest and only English-speaking nation had sought their help because the thousands of cays that Belize is working hard to develop into tourist attractions are attracting the wrong kind of travelers: International drug traffickers have turned some of the small Caribbean islands into storage and pickup points.

Indeed, tiny Belize, on Mexico’s southern border, is among the 20 or so countries classified internationally now as major narcotics transit and production points. Its remote jungles are tempting places to grow marijuana; that old trade provided the perfect new contacts for shipping Colombian cocaine and heroin into the United States.

Still, in March, officials here were shocked when the Clinton administration, as part of its annual process, formally declared that their country had failed to fully cooperate in the war against drugs.

That “decertification” put this former British colony in the same category as countries like Colombia, which supplies more than 70% of world cocaine and most U.S. heroin and whose president was allegedly elected with campaign contributions from drug barons. The U.S. classified Belize the same as it did pariah states such as Afghanistan, Myanmar, Iran, Nigeria and Syria, which make little or no effort to stop international narcotics operations.

The administration, citing its strategic location, deemed Belize important to U.S. national security and gave it a reprieve from the usual cutoff of foreign aid that follows decertification.

Still, the people of Belize were stung. Ornell Brooks, Belize’s 47-year-old police commissioner who took office in November, responded aggressively to prove the Americans wrong. “Ides of March”--a Belize-organized and -financed operation--seized nearly 1.7 tons of cocaine and a small amount of heroin. In early April, a second operation coordinated with the U.S. Coast Guard seized a like amount of cocaine.

“We had two goals,” Brooks said of the initial operation. “To cut off the drug from reaching its destination and to facilitate developing investigations both internally and multinationally. Both will lead to the ultimate dismantling of local groups working in collaboration with foreign cartels.”

Information from the investigations led to Colombia’s Northern Valley cartel, one of the new groups that have emerged since the leaders of the Medellin and Cali cartels were jailed or killed.

Investigators believe that Albert Gordon, a Belizean fisherman who was arrested in May as a result of information developed from the March and April operations, is a contact here for Jose Nelson Urrego Cardenas, known as “El Loco.”

Urrego is wanted on assault charges in Cali and drug trafficking charges in Bogota and Barranquilla. Police say he is the Northern Valley cartel’s contact on San Andres Island, Colombia’s jumping-off point to Central America and the Caribbean.

“Clearly, the traffic [in Belize] is managed from . . . Colombia and Mexico,” a source said. Brooks agreed that the three to five gangs operating in Belize are controlled from outside the country, making international cooperation, such as last month’s drug investigators meeting, essential.

By comparing notes, the investigators decided that their suspects--Belizeans, Colombians and Mexicans--had links to Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the accused drug kingpin who recently died in Mexico.

To combat corruption, Brooks has ordered the arrest of a police sergeant and corporal suspected of acting as couriers for the local drug mafias; 12 pounds of cocaine were found last month in a car they were driving.

His colleagues were impressed enough by Brooks’ results to put him in charge of a June operation in 26 Caribbean countries that netted more than 62 tons of cocaine and 828 arrests.

Diplomats say that Brooks’ record is impressive. But they also note that police work alone is not enough. Even Colombians, who are often criticized by Americans for lax sentencing in drug cases, consider Belizean jail terms too short; there is also criticism that Belize imposes bail so low that criminals do not think twice about skipping the country.

“Counter-narcotics efforts have been undermined by frequent failures to pursue accused criminals or secure convictions in the court system,” the 1996 U.S. State Department International Narcotics Control Strategy Report says. “Politics, incompetence, and corruption have accompanied undermanned and poorly equipped police investigative efforts.”

“In fact,” the report noted, “Belize has no history of ever sending a prominent citizen to jail.”