Belize

Belize is a Central American country, the only country in the region with historical ties to the United Kingdom (having formerly been British Honduras, it retained English as the nation's official language).

[Page 91]Though sparsely populated, it also has one of the fastest-growing populations in the Western hemisphere. A parliamentary democracy modeled after England, Belize's developing economy is powered principally by private enterprise, tourism, and the export of sugar and bananas.

Most Belizean criminal law stems from the 1980 criminal code, which has been amended several times and modified by specific acts. The 1990 Misuse of Drugs Act, for instance, was passed to deal with the rampant growth in the drug trade throughout Central America in the 1980s. For the first time, following the provisions of the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and related international drug treaties, the MDA provided for the forfeiture of vehicles used for drug trafficking, and proceeds proved to derive from that activity. Furthermore, jail sentences of up to 14 years and fines over $100,000 were assigned for various classes of drug trafficking crimes.

The MDA also established a National Drug Abuse Control Council to advise the prime minister on drug issues from a multilateral perspective: seeking not only to curtail drug use and punish those who sold them, but to rehabilitate addicts, to educate the public and the young, to restrict the availability of drugs even when arrests prove insufficient, and to advise farmers on alternate crop possibilities. What the MDA did not include was a mechanism of adjusting the list of drugs (separated into three classes of legality) over which it has jurisdiction; doing so, even adding a new drug to the list, would require an amendment.

In Central America, to a greater degree than in the north, dealing with the drug trade often raises questions about the agricultural sector and the fate of the farmers who have become dependent on the higher profit margins of poppy, marijuana, or coca. The near-consensus view is that once the cultivation of such crops was introduced to farmers, drug trafficking became an inevitability because of the amounts of money that stand to be earned. Further, as in many Central American countries, public opinion at the local level sometimes favors the drug traffickers because of the business they provide for poor farmers, much the way other harmful industries are perceived in parts of the world where the local economy is dependent on them.

Belize does not disclose official statistics on crime, which makes hard data about illegal drug use difficult to obtain; however, according to the United Nations, approximately 9 percent of the population between the ages of 12 and 65 use marijuana, slightly over 1 percent use amphetamines, and slightly less than 1 percent use cocaine annually. Much of the violent crime since the 1980s, and in particular the increase in violent crime over that period, is attributed to drug trafficking organizations, especially Colombian cocaine traffickers.

Narcotics law enforcement is the responsibility both of local police departments and of the Belize Defense Force (the Belizean military). Since 1989 Belize has relied heavily on assistance from the United States and the United Kingdom in combating drug trafficking. The U.S. Andean Strategy alone consisted of a $2.2 billion package of American military efforts in fighting drug trafficking stemming from Belize. Belizean citizens tend to support drug education and rehabilitation for addicts, but not the involvement of the military in fighting the drug war.

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