Is Belize Safe? The Advisory Levels, and the Crime Data Behind Them

Checked on 26 August 2026, against the US State Department’s own machine-readable advisory feeds, the UK FCDO content API, the Government of Canada’s advisory page, Belize Police Department district crime tables published by the Belize Crime Observatory, Statistical Institute of Belize population estimates, and World Bank homicide data.

Belize is at Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution, dated 11 March 2026. The State Department’s wording is: “Exercise increased caution in Belize due to crime. Some areas have increased risk. Please read the entire Travel Advisory.” One area is a full level higher: Southside Belize City is Level 3: Reconsider travel — “Reconsider travel to Southside Belize City due to crime.”

Belize is not one risk number. It is a Level 2 country containing a Level 3 neighbourhood, and the crime statistics that exist are published by district — a unit that puts Belize City and Ambergris Caye in the same row.

Where the higher level applies, exactly

The State Department draws the boundary as the south side of Belize City, from the Haulover Creek Canal continuing south to Fabers Road. Verbatim: “U.S. government employees are strongly discouraged from travel to the south side of Belize City from the Haulover Creek Canal continuing south to Fabers Road due to the danger of crime.”

Two other governments use the same northern edge. The UK FCDO writes “the area to the south of the Haulover Creek (known as Southside)”. Canada writes “Southside Belize City, south of the Haulover Creek River”. All three start the area at Haulover Creek; only the State Department names a southern limit, at Fabers Road. The UK and Canada leave the southern edge undefined.

The three advisories side by side

The 11 March 2026 US update carried its own change note: “There were no changes to the advisory level or risk indicators. Advisory summary was updated.” The level itself has not moved since at least that date.

The two things US government employees are told not to do

The advisory tells private citizens to copy the rules that apply to official personnel — verbatim: “Due to security risks, U.S. citizens should follow the same guidance as government employees while traveling. U.S. government employees are strongly discouraged from:”

1. Travelling to the south side of Belize City, from the Haulover Creek Canal south to Fabers Road.
2. Driving between cities in Belize after dark.

The second is a hard constraint on any seven-day route that moves between regions in the late afternoon, and it is stated by the US government rather than inferred.

Murders by district — the police data, worked into rates

The most recent comparative table we could retrieve from the Belize Police Department through the Belize Crime Observatory covers January to November 2023 and 2024, and is dated 5 December 2024. Eleven months, not full years.

The per-100,000 column is our arithmetic, dividing the police murder counts by Statistical Institute of Belize postcensal mid-2024 district populations. Because the counts cover eleven months, these are eleven-month rates, and they are comparable only with other eleven-month rates. An annual national figure is a different measure.

Two things in that table are worth reading carefully. Murders in Belize District fell from 50 to 36, a 28% drop on our arithmetic, while the national total was effectively flat, 78 to 80, because Cayo, Stann Creek and Corozal all rose. And Toledo records a murder rate roughly twelve times lower than Belize District’s.

The caveat that matters more than the table

Belize Police publish crime by district only. Ambergris Caye sits inside Belize District, together with Belize City.

The Statistical Institute of Belize lists three components of Belize District for 2024: Belize City 65,222, San Pedro Town 16,117, and Belize Rural 35,575 — Caye Caulker falls inside “Belize Rural” and is not broken out at all. Belize City is 56% of the district’s population, Belize Rural 30% and San Pedro Town 14% — our percentages from those SIB figures.

So Belize District’s 30.8 per 100,000 is a blend of Belize City, San Pedro Town and Belize Rural — and Belize Rural, which contains Caye Caulker, is more than twice the population of San Pedro Town. It is a district-wide figure covering all three areas together, and no sub-district series exists anywhere we could find that would isolate the caye. Any page that presents the district figure as San Pedro’s, or as Caye Caulker’s, is stating something the data does not say. We are printing the number and saying what it does not cover.

The other major crimes, by district

All January–November 2024, from the same police table.

Gun violence is far more concentrated than the murder counts alone suggest: Belize District accounts for 59% of all shooting incidents in the country while holding about 28% of its population. Both shares are our arithmetic — 103 of the 174 incidents, and the district’s 116,914 against the 410,919 the six district estimates sum to.

Robbery does not follow that pattern. Cayo recorded more robberies than Belize District — 43 against 39 — despite the smaller population, which works out at 41.6 per 100,000 against 33.4, again our arithmetic on the same police counts and SIB populations. Cayo is the San Ignacio district. Both figures are district-wide police counts, so they compare Cayo with Belize District — not San Ignacio with Belize City, which the data does not separate.

How Belize compares internationally

These are World Bank figures from UNODC source data. The years do not match: 2022 is the most recent year the World Bank publishes for Belize, while every comparator has 2023. We are not adjusting for that and not averaging it away.

On those numbers Belize is about 4.9 times the US rate — our division of 28.06 by 5.76 — modestly above Mexico’s, and well below Jamaica’s. That is what the FCDO’s “one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world” looks like numerically.

The national rate has also moved a long way. The World Bank series peaks at 43.36 in 2012 and reads 28.06 in 2022 — down about 35% across the decade, our percentage, with sharp reversals along the way (26.10 in 2020, back up to 31.62 in 2021).

What actually gets warned about in the tourist towns

Theft, rather than gang violence. The FCDO, verbatim: “Tourists, in general, are vulnerable to theft of cash, credit cards, phones and other personal belongings, including in tourist destinations such as San Pedro, Caye Caulker, Placencia and San Ignacio.”

Its own mitigations are specific enough to act on: “avoid dark alleys”; “use ATMs located in well-lit public areas or inside a bank or business”; “keep valuables out of sight”; “be aware that wearing expensive jewellery could attract attention”; “use a qualified guide for trips off the beaten track”; “only use accommodation and campgrounds that appear genuine and established”.

Canada names a longer list of places where violent incidents occur — Caye Caulker, Hopkins, Placencia, San Pedro, San Ignacio, Corozal and Seine Bight — with the framing “tourists are not usually targeted, but you could be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The FCDO puts the same point as “Tourists are not normally the targets of gang violence, but anyone near an incident could be affected.”

On taxis, the FCDO is concrete: “Only take registered taxis with green licence plates. Always ask the fare before getting in, and expect to pay in cash.”

The Guatemala-border forest — what the FCDO actually says

The FCDO, verbatim: “Armed criminals have been active in the remote forested areas of Belize, particularly the border area with Guatemala and close to tourist sites there. However, the area is patrolled by the Belize Defence Force and there have been no reported incidents involving tourists.”

Both halves of that sentence are the FCDO’s, and we quote both.

States of emergency: a recurring May pattern

The FCDO’s official change history records a state of emergency in place from 12 May 2026 covering specific regions within Belize City and the Belize District, with the notice removed on 12 June 2026. A previous one was declared 7 May 2025 and its notice removed on 2 July 2025.

The FCDO removed its state-of-emergency notice on 12 June 2026, and its change history has recorded none since — so as of 26 August 2026 none is in force. The pattern — targeted, temporary, confined to parts of Belize City and the Belize District, roughly each May — is dated and sourced, and it is a different thing from a country-wide emergency.

The risks that are not crime

• Medical. The State Department, verbatim: “Emergency medical services are usually unavailable or significantly delayed. Serious injuries or illnesses normally require medical evacuation to another country.” It also states “Local police lack the resources and training to respond effectively to serious crimes” and “Most crimes remain unresolved and unprosecuted.”
• Adventure activities. The FCDO: “There have been injuries and fatalities from adventure sports activities, including snorkelling and diving. The main causes have been inadequate safety precautions and severe weather conditions.” Its instruction is to “only use registered and licensed operators”.
• Disease. The CDC states “Malaria is a risk in some parts of Belize” and also lists dengue, Zika, chikungunya, Chagas, leishmaniasis, leptospirosis and rabies. Its only active travel notice for Belize is a Level 1 “Practice Usual Precautions” for global measles, dated 28 May 2025. The CDC page itself was updated 25 August 2026 — the freshest source on this page.
• Domestic aviation. The FCDO: “Following the hijacking of a small passenger aircraft on an internal flight on 17 April 2025, the Belize Airports Authority has announced security enhancements across Belize’s municipal airstrips. You may wish to allow extra time in case of disruption to domestic air travel.”

What the governments and police don’t publish

These are gaps in the official record, not in our looking:

• Crime data for Ambergris Caye or Caye Caulker specifically. District is the finest grain published, and both cayes sit inside Belize District with Belize City.
• A neighbourhood-level map or street list for Southside Belize City beyond the Haulover Creek-to-Fabers Road boundary the three governments give.
• Police district statistics for 2025 or 2026. The latest comparative table on the Belize Crime Observatory site is January–November 2023–2024, dated 5 December 2024. A 2024 end-of-year and a 2025 mid-year report are listed in its repository, but the download links are served by JavaScript and neither PDF could be retrieved.
• Any crimes-against-tourists series. Neither the Belize Police Department nor the Belize Tourism Board publishes one.
• Which parts of Belize carry malaria risk. The CDC says “some parts” and does not name them.
• The Belize Police Department’s own site, police.gov.bz, was unreachable throughout our checks (connection timeout). Every police figure here reached us through the Belize Crime Observatory, which republishes them. The State Department’s OSAC country security report returns HTTP 403 to automated clients and could not be read.

How we researched this

Scope: this page reports source research, not an on-site test. We checked the booking systems, timetables and official sources named below on the date shown; calculations, unresolved disagreements and information we could not verify are labelled explicitly.

The US advisory level, its wording, its date and its bullets were read from the State Department’s own machine-readable feeds — cadataapi.state.gov and the travel.state.gov RSS feed — because the HTML advisory page returns HTTP 403 to automated clients. Both feeds were fetched on 26 August 2026. The feed metadata gives Published and Updated timestamps of 2026-03-11T20:00:00-04:00; the RSS item’s own pubDate reads “Thu, 12 Mar 2026”. The two feeds also differ trivially in formatting — one returns “Exercise increased cautionin Belize” without a space, an artefact of its HTML stripping. We quote the RSS form.

The UK material came from gov.uk’s safety and security page and its content API, which is also where the dated state-of-emergency change history lives. The Canadian level and its 29 July 2026 timestamp came from travel.gc.ca. District crime counts were read directly from the Belize Police Department PDF hosted by the Belize Crime Observatory. Populations are Statistical Institute of Belize postcensal mid-2024 estimates. The homicide rates and the 2011–2022 series came from the World Bank API. The health section is the CDC’s Belize destination page.

Rates per 100,000, the percentage changes, the population shares and the US-rate multiple are our own arithmetic from those sources, and each one is labelled as ours where it appears. Where two governments or two feeds differ, we print both.

Last verified: 26 August 2026. Advisory levels change without notice, and the advisory level is the single figure on this page most likely to move — re-read it at the source before you travel.

Figures on this page labelled our arithmetic are calculated by us from the sourced inputs cited below — comparisons, percentages, multiples, differences, per-night and per-person conversions, running totals and currency conversions. Every other figure is reproduced as its named source published it. Where an operator or authority publishes a per-person or per-night rate directly, that is their figure and it is attributed to them at the point it appears.

Sources

• U.S. Department of State, Belize Travel Advisory — Level 2 wording and date, the Southside Level 3 exception and its boundary, the two discouraged activities, the police-capacity and medical-evacuation statements
• State Department advisory RSS feed and cadataapi.state.gov — how the advisory text and its 11 March 2026 timestamps were actually retrieved, and the formatting difference between the two
• UK FCDO, Belize — Safety and security — murder-rate characterisation, Southside boundary, tourist-theft warning and mitigations, Guatemala-border forest, adventure-sports fatalities, taxi rule, 2025 aircraft hijacking
• UK FCDO Belize content API — the dated state-of-emergency change history and the 12 June 2026 page update
• Government of Canada, Belize travel advice — Canadian level, its 29 July 2026 timestamp, the regional advisory, and the list of named tourist towns
• Belize Police Department district crime table, January–November 2023–2024, published via the Belize Crime Observatory — all murder, shooting, robbery and burglary counts
• Statistical Institute of Belize, postcensal population estimates by administrative area — district populations, and the Belize City / San Pedro Town / Belize Rural split
• World Bank, intentional homicides per 100,000 (VC.IHR.PSRC.P5) — Belize’s 2022 rate, the 2011–2022 series, and the four comparator countries
• CDC Travelers’ Health — Belize — malaria and other disease risks, and the measles notice

Written by Estuardo Enriquez. This site is independent, carries no affiliate relationship with any operator or organisation named here, and is not connected to any previous owner of this domain.