Stung by U.S censure,
Belize asks international help in its war on drugs

By JUANITA DARLING
Los Angeles Times

BELMOPAN, Belize The big guns of antinarcotics 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 Englishspeaking 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 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 cooperate fully in the war
against drugs.

That "decertification" put this former British colony in the same
category as countries such as Colombia, which supplies more than
70 percent of world cocaine and most U.S. heroin and whose
president was allegedly elected with campaign contributions from
drug barons. It classified Belize the same as it did pariah
states such as Afghanistan, Burma, 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 occurs after
decertification.

Still, the people of Belize were stung. Ornell Brooks, Belize's
47yearold police commissioner who took office in November,
responded aggressively to prove the Americans wrong. "Ides of
March" a Belizeorganized 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 an equal 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 has 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 with information developed from the March
and April operations, is a contact here for Jose Nelson Urrego
Cardenas, known as "El Loco."

Police believe Urrego 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.

To combat corruption, Brooks also has ordered the arrest of a
police sergeant and corpora, who are are suspected of acting as
couriers for local drug gangs.

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 acknowledge 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 bails so low that criminals do not
think twice about skipping the country.

"Counternarcotics 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."