The 100 million dollars’ worth of cocaine which Belizean law enforcement intercepted on the Coastal Road two weeks ago have been destroyed. Police have accounted for and burnt every single gram of it.
As readers are aware, on Thursday, February 27, 2020, the Belize Defense Force and the Police Department conducted joint operations to intercept a Gulfstream G2 Jet, which was illegally landed off the Coastal Road. That jet was loaded with 69 bales, which were carrying 2,054 parcels of cocaine. The unknown traffickers were trying to use Belizean soil as a drug transshipment point.
This was a very successful anti-drug operation that was soured by the fact that the nation lost four brave soldiers. They were part of the crew that was providing air support for the ground law enforcement teams, who moved in to ensure that the narcotics traffickers could not escape with this drug cargo. The BDF U1H1 helicopter they were in went down a short distance from where that narco jet was illegally landed.
Completing the law enforcement mission that those soldiers gave their lives for, the Belize Police Department organized a session to destroy the entire cargo. That happened on Tuesday, March 10, 2020 at a location that police asked the press not to disclose for security reasons.
Assistant Police Commissioner Marco Vidal, the Commander of Operations for the Department, granted an interview to the press in which he discussed the formal steps involved in disposing of this illicit cargo.
Vidal said, “Once we discover drugs or cease a large number of drugs the next process then is to go through the process of weighing each parcel and once that is done and the forensic is satisfied that it has been done we then apply to the court for an order to destroy the drugs. That was granted this morning and today we have traveled all the way here… where we will now engage in the destruction of the drugs with the Clerk of Court, a justice of the peace, Scenes of Crime technicians, the forensics, the prosecutor, and the investigator.”
They did just that and spent several hours, randomly applying cocaine tests to different parcels in the cargo, for confirmation. After that, every single one of those 2,000+ parcels was then thrown on a big bonfire, and the officers watch them burn completely.
By the measurement of the law enforcement agencies, the total weight of the drug cargo was determined to be 2,300.94 kilograms, the second-largest drug bust that has ever happened on Belizean soil. The largest happened 15 years ago when law enforcement seized 2,376 kilograms of cocaine.
