San Pedro is a tourist mecca known for its night life along “Front Street” (not the official name, which the locals never use), water sports, and its long coral reef, popular with divers.
There’s a dark side, however. Belize is a very dangerous place, among the top ten countries worldwide for homicide. You can literally shoot someone in the street and the police will do nothing because they are so low paid that they’re unwilling to risk their lives chasing bad guys. They only act when there’s a mass killing, such as happens with great regularity between rival drug gangs.
San Pedro has long stretches of sparsely inhabited sand dunes. These contain private docks for “cigarette” speedboats laden with drugs making their way from South America to Miami. The dealers stop off for the night, and sell whatever they can locally. At least a third of the locals are crackheads, and tourists are continually panhandled and occasionally assaulted by crazed druggies looking for money. Another third of the locals are hookers who work the tourists; many of them under 16. AIDS is an epidemic in Belize, and it is rampant in San Pedro.
The local government — and the national government as well — is corrupt from the very top to the very bottom. It is no secret that in San Pedro you can get a driver’s license in ten minutes for a $100 bribe, but it takes months if you go through “channels”. The Traffic Department is not only corrupt, but inept as well. The only person who actually knows how to do something there is away from her full time job most of the time, working as a DJ at a local watering hole. If you are in San Pedro and get in trouble, the only honest government officials on the island are the people who work in Immigration; they are serious and very proud of their jobs. Go to them in an emergency, but if you listen to me, you shouldn’t be in Belize in the first place.
Another place to go if you get in trouble in San Pedro is any hardware store. All the hardware stores in San Pedro are owned by a tightly knit social group of Arabs — some of them related — who have been so oppressed in their native countires that they have deep sympathy for people on the run from corrupt governments or who find themselves down and out through no fault of their own. They will definitely help you whatever your needs are. They know how to deal with the local government if you need to get something done.
