B.D.F. Destroys Marijuana Plantations in the Chiquibul

David Jones

The shooting of the Guatemalan minor occurred in the Chiquibul, in an area which is known for illegal marijuana plantations. Ironically, on Wednesday Brigadier-General David Jones spoke to us about the ongoing B.D.F. patrols in the area to address the situation of illegal farming and marijuana cultivation. He couldn’t have known that just hours after his interview those soldiers would be caught in a shootout with Guatemalans, leading to what is a very, very volatile situation between countries.

Brig. Gen. David Jones, Commander, Belize Defence Force

“We continue to patrol the area. Whenever we find people operating in the area we work with our N.G.O.s and we arrest them and we bring them in. You’ve seen on the news that we captured three people near the Ceibo Chico area. That’s a B.D.F. installation that is jointly shared with members of the FCD. That is not going to stop. What we’ve realized recently is that the marijuana operations that we do used to be in excess of a kilometer, two or three kilometers inside of Belize. Now they’re planting these marijuana plantations within the adjacency zone, so it is within a kilometer inside of Belize. So it is becoming a bit more tricky…more difficult for us to arrest this situation. So we normally get helicopters to do those operations. For now that helicopter support is coming from Honduras, from the US Military. We have an operation that is going on now on the ground, destroying marijuana operations. Just yesterday we destroyed over twenty-one thousand plants, not just in the Chiquibul but along the Western border. So we’re targeting the Cayo District, the Orange Walk District and also the Toledo District. We didn’t express that to the media because we didn’t want people to be alerted that operations are happening as we speak, so as we speak now there are operations on the ground where we have in excess of over ninety soldiers on the ground destroying marijuana plantations and agrarian encroachments inside Belize.”