Belize a transit point for Mexican dope dealers
Washington Post: The sleepy port towns, mangrove swamps and jungle airstrips of poorly defended, tiny Belize are becoming prime gateways for drug trafficking as Mexico’s billionaire mafias carve out new smuggling routes through Central America. Using light aircraft and ultra-fast boats, traffickers are moving more and more South American cocaine through Belize into Mexico, U.S. narcotics agents and Belizean officials say. By landing their lucrative cargo in Belize, the traffickers avoid detection by beefed-up Mexican army and navy patrols, marking the latest advance by the Mexican cartels into Central America’s impoverished, weak states, through which as much as 90 percent of the cocaine that reaches the United States now passes, according to U.S. assessments. Belize’s growing role as a smuggling corridor prompted the Obama administration to add it to the annual “black list” of countries considered major drug producers or transit routes for narcotics. The 2...