2 Drug Planes in Less than 24 Hours

Chester Williams

Two drug planes in less than twenty-four hours land in Belize and the illicit cargo is whisked away. On Tuesday’s newscast, we reported on the drug plane that crash landed up north around three a.m. that morning. It was one of two tracks that were being monitored by Belize law enforcement overnight. But last night, another two narco-planes were being tracked from South America en route to this area. This morning, Commissioner of Police Chester Williams said that a plane went down somewhere in Graham Creek in Toledo. It’s a highly vegetated area that is difficult to access, but was used last year by another plane.

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police

“Last night we were monitoring two tracks again. As we normally do, we were monitoring two tracks again. As we normally do, we deployed our personnel across the country in different areas and around one a.m., one of planes hovered over the Bladen area for about twenty minutes. We had a team there. We believe they may have suspected that we had teams in that area and so they went to the Kanantik area. And we had a team there as well so they circled there for like ten minutes and perhaps they figured something was wrong again and they moved on and went down south. And then we later found out that the plane may have landed in the Graham Creek area, near the Belize Guatemalan border. Again that’s an area that is heavily vegetated and poses significant challenges to the security forces to get to that location so I believe that’s the reason why that area is chosen. I can say at this time that we have not confirmed the landing, but we have all reasons to believe that the plane did land in that area. Teams are currently on their way to the location; it will take them about six to nine hours to get there. That just goes to show the challenges that we are going to have to get there and as soon as they have confirmed the landing, then we will share. Indeed they seemingly have their act together, but as security forces, we continue to do our best to be able to overcome whatever they may bring. And notwithstanding what they may do, we still always try our best endeavour to be able to respond adequately. They have become very sophisticated. Obviously, you know that these narco-traffickers will do whatever they can to get their cargo from point A to point B and when these planes come they don’t have one landing spot. They have several proposed landing spots, so if one area fail, they move to another and if that fail they go to another. So in most case, they have up to tertiary landing spots and that is the case we believe with the one last night. The primary might have been Bladen, the secondary could have been Kanantik and then the tertiary is where it eventually landed in the Graham Creek area.”