For years, drug traffickers have relied on clandestine air routes to move cocaine from Venezuela to the United States, bypassing maritime patrols and land-based interdictions. Now, a series of leaked emails from Mexico’s defense ministry has shed light on an overlooked element of that trafficking network: private jets regularly ferrying narcotics into Belize, a small Central American nation long considered peripheral to the regional drug trade.

The documents – part of a trove of hacked correspondence obtained by the activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets and shared with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) – reveal at least 70 alerts issued by US authorities to their Mexican counterparts between 2020 and 2021. Each alert tracked suspected drug flights departing from airstrips around Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city, bound for Belize.

The revelations complicate the prevailing narrative that Guatemala and Honduras were the primary landing points for Venezuelan drug flights during that period. While previous investigations, including a 2019 CNN report, focused on those countries, Belize’s role as a fallback destination has largely escaped scrutiny. The new disclosures suggest Belize was more than an occasional diversion; traffickers used it consistently, averaging nearly one illicit landing every five days over a two-year span.

The “air bridge” linking Venezuela with Central America has long been a focal point for US anti-narcotics policy. American officials allege that Venezuela, under Nicolás Maduro, has allowed traffickers aligned with Colombian cartels to operate from its territory with minimal interference. Small private jets – often Gulfstreams or Cessnas purchased through intermediaries and registered under........

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