If you think you know the John McAfee story by the accounts of the mainstream press,  it sounds ultra-sensational. That’s how it seemed to me before I spent time interviewing John McAfee and subsequently spending time verifying his claims.

At the same time, you don’t have to throw out all the saucier elements, either.  Things happened: there were accusations of drug activity, McAfee’s company of seven young women, there were weapons and a number of people were undoubtedly hurt.

In my extensive interviews with McAfee, and he’s allowed me to review the documentation he’s collected. I’ve distilled much of it to the following highlights, for clarity:

• McAfee gets to Belize, starts a series of businesses.
• McAfee donates to law enforcement, cash, equipment, weapons, programs that feed children and helping single mothers.
• McAfee is approached by Anthony Rayburn, local politician for a $2 Million donation, McAfee refuses.
• McAfee begins to try and contact Belize Minister of National Security, John Saldivar.
• Two weeks later, McAfee’s property was raided by a team of 65 from Gang Suppression Unit (GSU) and BDF.
• McAfee deploys his keylogging software-loaded systems and begins collecting information from the computers he had donated to the government.
• McAfee is followed throughout his days and attempts to “collect” him are conducted at night.
• The situation in Belize comes to a head for McAfee when his neighbor, Gregory Faull, is murdered.
• The Belizean government names McAfee as a person of interest, and McAfee subsequently flees to avoid being detained.

Two years after the murder of Gregory Faull, the case remains unsolved, and the public pursuit of Mr. McAfee in any of these matters has seemingly stopped.

McAfee maintains that is because they have always wanted to pin the murder on him due to his ongoing dealings and fallout with Belizean officials, exposure of their corrupt dealings and the hours of video, audio and documents that he has collected.

In my investigation, I found that there were wide swaths of relevant information ignored by most reports. This installment of the series is a bit of a rewind, where we look at the facts we can find, the background that is missing from the public narrative.  This is about tangible information and a recreation of the narrative with this information in hand, along with the testimony of witnesses.

McAfee’s story of where he is today starts in Belize. So it’s time to take a good, hard look at that country, its history and how it functions.  Obviously, Belize is by all measures a tropical paradise, and a favorite tourist destination.

McAfee himself describes it as, “the most beautiful place in the world.”

Coming from a man who has been around the world, someone who built a custom beachfront estate in Hawaii and in other idyllic locations that would take most people’s breath away, that is a very large statement.

The imagery of crystal blue waters and beautiful white beaches are what most people know, and what the nation of Belize wants to be known for.  The country’s history can be traced back to Mayan civilization, and feature heavily a series of wars, violence, slavery, and was a hotbed of pirate activity during the 17th century.

Battles are a part of the fabric of this small country, that include struggles for land, wealth, power and even life itself.  Belize has, at one time or another, been occupied by numerous foreigners such as the English, Dutch, Spanish and the French — it is a land of grand struggles.

Belize became independent in the fall of 1981, some 400 years after pirates first discovered and ruled this paradise.  With this extremely brief historical background in hand, the setting for McAfee’s story is a bit clearer — it is at the same time a beautiful place and a place with a fascinating history.

As Shakespeare once wrote, “the past is prologue,” and it shapes the future.

Present-day Belize

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Absent a history lesson, many may be quite surprised to know that Belize is also a den of corruption, of violent gangs, significant drug activity and brutal police and military tactics.  On September 15, 2011 U.S. President Barack Obama added Belize and El Salvador to the blacklist of 22 countries that are either major producers of illegal drugs or major transit routes for illegal drugs. The U.S. State Department in 2012 also reported that more than eighty percent of the cocaine that enters the US went through Central America, an area that includes Belize.

Belize sits on the edge of what is known as “the Northern Triangle”, comprised of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.  All of these are recognized as violent territories and for being a major source of major drug activities.  It can only be expected that this activity would spill over into a neighboring country and the president’s inclusion of Belize onto that list only reinforces the fact that the smuggling routes have long expanded beyond this ‘triangle’.  The parties that are behind that trafficking are the drug cartels.

The problems with drugs and violence are quickly verified in report after report.  For example, reports of illegal airstrips all along the north of the country turn up again and again.  These are hot spots for smugglers, proximal to the Mexican border and act as stops from Columbia and Venezuela. 

For most, it was a real eye opener to see a drug plane blatantly use one of the country’s four major highways as a runway. But for the BDF [Belize Defense Force] it was nothing new. Belize’s army has been destroying illegal airstrips for decades – and every year, they keep cropping up in the middle of nowhere.

Various official U.S. reports have identified the infiltration and influence of the cartels into the highest ranks of government in Guatemala, Mexico and Belize is officially considered to be susceptible because of what are considered lax anti-corruption laws.  As you’ll read later, more information about this infiltration has started to become official.

The 2013 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) is an annual report by the Department of State to Congress prepared in accordance with the Foreign Assistance Act.  It verifies the following:

Belize is a major transshipment country for cocaine and precursor chemicals used in the production of synthetic drugs. Due to its position along the Central American isthmus, Belize is susceptible to the transshipment of cocaine between drug producing countries in South America and the United States, as well as chemicals bound for processing into finished drugs in Mexico.

The United States estimated that more than 80 percent of the primary flow of the cocaine trafficked to the United States first transited through the Central American corridor in 2012. Large stretches of remote, unpopulated jungles on its borders with Guatemala allow smuggling of cannabis and synthetic drugs.

A relatively unpatrolled coastline including hundreds of small islands and atolls make maritime drug interdiction difficult. Belize is bordered by countries where the drug trade is controlled by organized and violent drug cartels.

Questions about propriety and truthfulness follow public officials almost everywhere you can imagine, but there is a preponderance of suspicion of very egregious conduct throughout the Belizean government.  It is a standard in the news, in open social discussions and it seems to be a standard part of the culture, carrying on as though these things are well-known yet little seems to be done about it.

In an article entitled  ‘Fragile States: The Drug War in Central America‘,  part of a series of reports on the issue by Nick Miroff of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, he describes the situation:

In the region’s small, weak states, the cartels have found pliant politicians, ample money-laundering opportunities and vast tracts of unguarded jungles and cays for their trafficking operations. U.S. drug officials say more than 90 percent of the cocaine that reaches the United States moves through these countries.

The billion-dollar business is enacting a terrible cost. Awash in guns and leftover munitions from the fratricidal conflicts of the Cold War, several Central American nations have soaring murder rates that are now several times higher than Mexico’s.

‘Pliant politicians’ is a kind description for a rampant problem and when it comes to Belize a simple Google search for corruption and Belize will tell you all you need to know.  Transparency International is a group that produces a yearly report on perceived levels of public sector corruption in 177 countries

Last year’s index didn’t even include Belize.  The reason?  The Belizean government didn’t submit any information to the organization.  Based on conversations I’ve had with experts on the matter, the country would rank at or near the top.

Outsiders under suspicion, as a matter of course.

 

Belize is happy to take tourist money, but there seems to be little trust beyond that.  A recent report on Channel 5 Belize went into the background of an American businessman named Lord Neil Gibson and his involvement with a local election.  According to the report, his companies were told they could not do business in Belize, until Minister of Trade and Investment Erwin Contreras intervened to support and defend Gibson and his activities.

As uncovered in the following, never before seen document that we’ve obtained from John McAfee, there appears to be an extended relationship between Contreras and Gibson.

[Editor’s Note: How did McAfee obtain these documents? The Ultimate Hack, the first post in the John McAfee series for the answer. -mrh]

The document describes a suggestion for donation of $100 million to found a national bank, an extraordinary arrangement for a foreign investor to say the least.  There is a great contrast however if you look at the publicly released document where they purport to be funding a port, the mention of the donation doesn’t exist.

That duality, the air of large payouts and funding of ‘projects’, cannot help the public image in a country where such a large amount of the population live in abject poverty.  Whether Gibson is an outstanding American businessman, or as accusations dictate, a part of the corruption problem, are part of an ongoing public mystery and investigation.

To wit, Gibson defends himself from these discussions as a ‘slander campaign‘.  Indeed, the image could have come from anywhere, and in a digital age, anything is possible.

That, however, is the playing field of Belize, where there are constant accusations of privilege, payoffs and corruption. Murder rates are high.  There are extremely rich people that set up shop, and then there are the very poor.  There is no middle.  In Belize, it’s inescapable.

It may explain why many feel that the age of pirates never really ended here, and it matters to know that this environment is where McAfee set himself up a home.

McAfee stares down corruption

 

According to McAfee, it is this very same corruption that has been a central character in the story of his life and times in Belize.  The events at his compound and thereafter have been the subject of television news, of countless articles, of an upcoming movie and all of that has been rather focused on McAfee himself.

It would seem that an overzealous desire to focus on the question of sanity, drug use, and the other more salacious aspects of McAfee’s life in Belize have overshadowed any impulse by the media to focus on the corruption and violence native to the country.

There came a point at which corruption landed on McAfee’s doorstep, and where most people may just pack up and go, McAfee stayed.

“I thought I could change things.” – John McAfee

I was not there in Belize when the famed events happened — few were.  Still, what little testimony can be found today do not seem to me to add up to the story of a millionaire gone wild, who started a meth lab in a third world country, and who killed a man over dog complaints.

Instead, there seems to be a discernible consistency on particular events and of the entire story at every point discovered thus far.

I’ve interviewed a number of people in Belize, and others who were around McAfee around the time his name entered international news cycles, in an attempt to corroborate (or debunk) what I’ve learned from John McAfee himself. It paints a different picture than what Wired and others famously reported, and its a story I continue to investigate, free of the pursuit of movie scripts and free of character elements that go back over thirty years.

I have spoken to people that are apparently being punished for even knowing McAfee, including a man whose brother was murdered, allegedly for witnessing a separate murder.

In early 2013, about a week before McAfee’s property in Belize was to close for sale, it burned down, in what many (including McAfee) say are “suspicious circumstances.”

Clearly the timing of the blaze is at the top of those circumstances, as is the relationship that McAfee has with public officials.

We may never know for sure if the fire was an act of arson and retribution. What we do have are official reports that rule out arson and cited problems with wildfires in the area.  Not everyone buys the coincidence, however.

Today there are only a few legal remnants that remain of McAfee in Belize.  Belizean authorities auctioned off McAfee’s seized assets after he left the country.  Officially there was a very public shared desire from the government of Belize to question McAfee as a ‘person of interest’ in the matter, but no actual charges were brought against him, ever. Similarly, here in the United States there are no criminal charges, but there is an open injury lawsuit filed by family of businessman Greg Faull in the US Florida Middle District Court.

Unsolved Mysteries and Dean Barrow

 

McAfee has pointed out a number of persons of interest from the course of his investigation of the data he’s collected [Ed: …And we will, too, in the next post in this series. -mrh].  As one starts to see those in power in present-day Belize, and their character, McAfee’s version of events suddenly seems saner.

These people include Dean Barrow, John Saldivar, Eduardo and Gaspar Vega, Alvin Penner and John Zabaneh.  Zabaneh is a man who was named by the U.S. Department of Treasury as a drug kingpin, an operative of the Sinaloa cartel and its former head Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman.  U.S. citizens have unsurprisingly been banned from having any business dealings with Zabaneh and his organization.

The Gang-Suppression Unit (GSU) was formed by Belizean Prime Minister Dean Barrow, and was the same force documented to have raided McAfee’s property under the auspices of searching for illicit guns and drug manufacturing.

The GSU’s official mandate is to take on gang activity.  However, the GSU is constantly scrutinized for brutal tactics and implicated themselves in assassinations, intimidation and violence.  Witness the following video of Barrow taken by Belizean-American artist and citizen journalist Glen Fuller [Ed: The following video may be disturbing for some. -mrh].

Dean Barrow is the same official that on Nov 14, 2012 famously called McAfee ‘bonkers’ and ‘paranoid’ in statements to the international press.

“I have never met the man, don’t know what he looks like,” said Barrow to the press.

By this time not only was McAfee in the news, he had been discussing Barrow for a great amount of time before in the media.  This statement doesn’t pass the smell test.

In looking at almost every piece of news that comes out of Belize, whether it be investigations, scandal or public incidents, Dean Barrow’s comments and his office emerge at some point in time.  He is tied to practically everything that happens in the country, while he maintains plausible deniability when asked publicly.

We’ll return to Dean Barrow in our follow-ups and more about the characters in the McAfee story in the next article.

Keep reading SiliconANGLE for the rest of the posts the McAfee series.

John McAfee’s Ultimate Hack.

Deconstructing McAfee.

John McAfee in Belize, land of pirates.

photo credits: slimmer_jimmer via photopin cc, whoismcafee.com