As one ages, one is better able to accept one’s flaws and inadequacies. Personally, I have a problem with NORTH AMERIKKKAN BLUES, which I wrote in early 1971, because I know I was trying to “show myself,” as we say in the streets.
The street/military leader of UBAD, Charles X “Justice” Eagan, had been sentenced to five years in jail in January of 1971, and Norman Fairweather, who returned from New York around the same time, had not yet re-established himself as a street force. I knew I was puffing out my chest in BLUES, but I was just 23, 24, so perhaps history will forgive me.
A lot of things have changed since 1971, and they have changed drastically and dramatically. In 1971, the weed business in the capital city was small and confined to “‘cross the Yabra bridge.” One of the reasons the weed industry was still small was because a lot of city youth were still accepting the propaganda that weed made you “get crazy.”
As an export industry, my sense is that weed became an item in British Honduras in the early 1960s, and it involved Americans, in the first instance. I remember the name of Vic Stadter. The most prominent Belizean who was involved with the Americans was a stud named Dickie Gardiner, who had been a big Panama lottery man in the streets. with Nacho Coye, after their return from Panama. Late 1940s, early 1950s, I guess. (Gardiner served two different prison terms in the United States.)
Around 1975 or so, when the Melting Pot disco was beginning to kick up a lot of dust in Belize City, it was being run by two African Americans — an attorney named Ben Darden and his sidekick, Willie Trapp. Darden was in an affair with a Belizean lady by the name of Gail Dunn, whose father was Kenneth Dunn, the Commissioner of Labor at the time, if I remember correctly.
Darden and Trapp ran afoul of Deputy Premier, C. L. B. Rogers, who was the Minister of Police, and Rogers deported them after they were accused of exporting cocaine to America inside frozen lobsters.
The likelihood is that cocaine, for all intents and purposes, began becoming an item in Belize through the Melting Pot disco, of which Roy “Bullet” Craig became the owner after Darden. Craig had made millions selling stuff in New York City with his 123rd group of Belizeans. Precisely when they were busted by the American feds I can’t say, although the late Patrick “Beans” Lawrence was always giving me stats on 123rd.
Anyway, around 1978 a Colombian by the name of Carlos Lehder Russell was looking for a safe haven from which to export cocaine into the United States. He was talking to people in the Belize government, it seemed to me, but he ended up buying an island in the Bahamas, where he set up his cocaine export business before the feds got ahold of him.
The bottomline of everything that has happened in Belize is that there was this exponentially growing demand in the United States, then clearly the richest country in the world, for marijuana in the 1960s, and then cocaine in the 1970s and 1980s. The Americans had made these substances illegal in the 1930s, so in a manner similar to how the American government’s declaring alcohol illegal in 1919 (Prohibition) had spawned the growth of a deadly Italian Mafia in the 1920s, the “illegalization” of marijuana and cocaine has led our region to where we are today, from South America through Central America and the Caribbean, and, ultimately, Mexico. Life “south of the border” is cheap. As Sergio Leone wrote in one of his Western movies, “Where life has no value, death sometimes has its price.”
Around 1975, I was running the streets, unemployed as such, when a friend kept urging me to buy some Orange Walk weed from him. My thinking was that I needed to do research on what the profit margin was in the business, for my personal understanding. I bought a pound of weed from him. The price back then was $70. The weed was good. How the weed got from Sugar City to Belize City was somewhat of an adventure in itself, but once a friend rolled off the weed for me, I quickly found out something very basic: you had to be a tough guy in this business, because people would “games” you. I am definitely not a tough guy, so when that pound was done, I got the hell out of there.
Here’s the point I want to make in this column: cocaine, amphetamines, and marijuana are in demand on the American market. Let’s focus on the cocaine trade, where the biggest profits and the most incredible violence take place. Consider our youth in the old capital — unemployed, uneducated, broke, hungry, and desperate. They become mules and cannon fodder for Belize’s cocaine dons. But, the root cause of the problem is in the sanctimonious United States, where so many Americans are so hungry for a high.
I will end by saying this to those of you Belizeans who are innocent. The tourists who come to Belize want drugs. So, apart from the export market, there is a domestic market for drugs in Belize, in every tourist destination in The Jewel. When our youth are murdering each other, they are doing so in the war for control of the market.
Sometimes, the general consensus is that the late, great Rt. Hon. George Price was a saint. Personally, I don’t believe this, but I believe he would have fought to save young Belizeans from themselves where this drug violence is concerned.
Perhaps I am wrong, but in Belize City I know that the gangs and drug violence became bad after the Americans sprayed our weed fields with paraquat in 1985. Sandra Coye has claimed that there was a period (presumably in the late 1970s, early 1980s) when drugs, presumably marijuana, had become so big in Orange Walk that everybody did business in U.S. currency. Can you dig it?
This column is saying that most of our Belizean problem begins in the United States of America. Don’t condemn our Belizean youth. Blame the Americans who are desperate for the high.
Yes, I know a lot of youth have died because of the high-grade Mexican weed market in Belize. But, you must ask yourself this question, at least yours truly does: would this have been the case if the paraquat had not been sprayed here? Food for thought, beloved, food for thought.