JOHN McAFEE: Here's what really happened in Belize

John McAfee is running for US president as a member of the Libertarian Party. This is an op-ed he wrote and gave us permission to run.

We never escape our past. It is the foundation of who we are. For most people, their past is a selected set of thoughts, actions and feelings that they choose to divulge to others, and that set of disclosures varies depending upon their relationship to those "others."

A stranger in the street may receive a virtual null set, a spouse may receive everything that the person can remember. It is a choice that most people have a right to exercise. That right is the right to privacy.

However, for most of us in the public eye, we give up that right by choosing to be in the public eye. It is one if the drawbacks of fame, notoriety or prominence.

In no area of life do we we give up that right to privacy more than in the field of politics, and to me this seems just and right. The people need to know, at the deepest level, the people that they choose to represent them.

One of the most strenuous parts of my entry into politics has been disclosing a life that has been lived entirely out of the box. It is not a simple matter of disclosing the life of a businessman who has lived within the norm and has transgressions, such as marital infidelity, lies, etc., which must be scrutinized and explained. That would be a simple task.

But my life, influenced by minds such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson while I was in college, has been a non-stop experimentation into the meaning of freedom, responsibility and our true relationship to the human structures and the living world within which we live.

It is not easy for the average person to gain a reference point for the evaluation of my life.

Up until the age of 38, I experimented with drugs of every kind. I became addicted to some, was scarred by others and was astonished by a few. I have discussed this in the national and world press more times than I can count.

I am currently married to an ex-prostitute. The details of of how this came about have also been divulged by me many times.

I have been jailed multiple times, and have had brushes with law both here in America and abroad, and it is in this aspect of my life that the average person cannot find a reference point for understanding. I cannot blame them. I myself have difficulty, sometimes, believing that what I have experienced actually happened.

In every case of my brushes with the law, with the exception one - caused by pure stupidity; a DUI - I can attribute to my belief that every one of us possesses the fundamental right to civil disobedience. This right, articulated so beautifully by Thoreau in his essay “Civil Disobedience”, declares that laws that are unjust, immoral or unconstitutional can be protested through our actions.

A good example is my multiple brushes with the law for drug use when I was younger. I believed then, and even more strongly now, that my body and my mind belong to me, and that what I choose believe, ingest, adorn myself with, tattoo onto my body, etc. Is my business and no-one else's. My body and mind do not not belong to anyone else, and certainly not to the government.

John McAfee

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.

John McAfee

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.

The Belizean government, of course, in its insidious fashion, has been continuing to structure a case that will someday, force my return to Belize.

I was never charged with anything.

The day after my neighbor's murder, the Belizean police came to question me, from which questioning, I knew I would never return. There are horrors (torture, dismemberment, et.) inside Belizean jails.

I went underground, escaped into Guatemala, where I was arrested, and after a legal battle was returned to the US rather than to Belize.

The rest is history. If I have fault in this entire process, then it is the sin of arrogance. I believed that I could stand alone against a sea of corruption and fix it. I could not. No one could who stands alone.

I am now standing against a similar, but more sophisticated form of corruption: Our government and the political process which creates and supports it. I am seeking the nomination of the Libertarian Party for President. Who will stand with me?

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