John McAfee explains what really happened in Belize:
My most prominent act of civil disobedience occurred in Belize, when I refused to be extorted by the government. This led to a series of events that to this day, no fictional movie has matched.
Politics has again raised my Belize experience into public awareness. My opponents in the Libertarian party have cloaked me yet again with questions about Belize.
I would like to put this issue to rest, and I will do my best, now, to do so. Belize, by any standards, is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Its officials are intimately connected with the illegal drug trade, human trafficking, and money laundering. For all practical purposes it is barely distinguishable from the Sinaloa Cartel.
Into this morass I inserted myself.
I moved to Belize in 2008, thinking I would retire and fish, scuba dive, sail and otherwise enjoy my declining years.
I was 63 at the time. My retirement lasted just a few months. I moved to the North Island of San Pedro, where the roads were impassable and all residents depended on the one ferry service — Island Ferry — whose dozen or so boats ferried people back and forth to town from the 30 mile coastline of the North Island. The boats were unreliable and schedules were seldom kept.
This annoyed me so I started my first business in Belize — the Coastal Xpress.
I charged less than half of what the Island Ferry was charging, ferried school children back and forth from school for free, charged one quarter of Island Ferry prices for local Belizeans, bought a fleet of brand new covered boats, kept to a strict schedule, and put Island Ferry out of business within three months. The owner of Island Ferry was a Canadian with friends in high places within the Belizean Government.
Needless to say, I made no friends with my first business venture, other than the Belizean citizens working for my new company, who shared whatever profits were made. I never took a single penny out of Coastal Xpress. My benefit came from having reliable transportation to and from town.
I formed more than a dozen other companies in Belize, from a water sports rental company, to a coffee producer to an antibiotic research lab. They were all staffed by local Belizeans and from no company did I take a single penny.
Doing business in Belize brought me quickly into direct contact with the corruption that is Belize. Government officials frequently expect a piece of the business, a share of the profits or regular bribes, which I, foolishly perhaps, declined to co-operate with.
I also foolishly began to speak openly about the system of corruption and how it kept the majority of Belizean citizens in abject poverty.
In 2011, I caught wind of a government plot to kill me. The following two secretly taped conversation between an agent of the Belizean government and a number of conspirators details the options that the government was considering to get rid of me. The conversations are in Creole — a barely understandable form of English, but written translations accompany each tape. The assassination methods considered ranged from a sniper attack to planting explosive devices in my car. They are very entertaining tapes (tape 1 and tape 2).
It takes more than a simple assassination plot to cause me to run. I instead beefed up my security and, again, unwisely perhaps, stepped up my verbal attacks on the government.
In April of 2012, a local representative visited my jungle compound in the interior, and discreetly suggested that a $2 million dollar donation to the ruling party could cause our impasse to simply go away. I declined.
One week later, on May 2, 2012, my jungle compound was stormed by 42 paramilitary soldiers of the universally feared GSU.
They shot my dog in front of eyes, destroyed a half million dollars worth of my property, subjected me to indignities, and arrested me on false charges which were dropped a few hours later.
The following day, I was contacted by the same representative that had originally asked for the $2 million dollars and who now asked whether or not I had changed my mind. I told him to f— off.
Thus began a war between myself and the government of Belize that went on until October of 2012, when my neighbor was murdered. To this day I believe the target was myself, and that the incompetence of the government caused the assassins to enter the wrong house.
What an insufferable prick. You either pay the bribe, or you replace the government. What’s the point of signaling your purity of heart just to get your dog and neighbor killed?
Spandrell may be right, but replacing a government starts with one person refusing to buckle under.
Insufferable prick? Did your computer get hacked, or virus? $2mil even for that prick is a bit. What McAfee did wrong was blow his chance to offer his “services” to the Belize govt and to then double cross and extort them. From a fortified estate in Martinique.
So, the story goes, this rich guy moves in and puts the local taxi boats out of business. He bought new boats and they ran on time and he never took a dime from any of his businesses. I think he pompously upset the local way of doing things and put people out of business for his own convenience. The locals have a hard time making a living and they, too, must pay off the government. You retired comfortably, but just couldn’t resist taking over. Shame on you for placing your family and your neighbors in harms way.