Upon leaving, around 8:00 p.m., they were given plastic cups by the bartender to put their beer in. They had already reached their vehicle and were about to enter when two vehicles containing ten policemen pulled up and began to search them, telling them that it was a ?routine check.?

The policemen also searched other Mexicans who were in the establishment?s parking lot, but then told the Belizeans that they would have to be taken in because they ?were drinking in public.? Protestations that they were using plastic cups, that they were still in the parking lot and not on the street, and that the other Mexicans in the parking lot also had plastic cups, did not save them.

The policemen turned a deaf ear to everything they said, but then did something strange. The businessman and his two friends all had plastic cups with beer, but the policemen, after asking who the driver was, only took two of them, leaving the driver.

When they were leaving, the policemen told the driver that ?if he wanted to help his friends, he must follow them to the station.?

At the police station the men were told that they had committed what was understood to be a ?misdemeanor,? and would have to pay 5,000 pesos (about BZ$1,000) to be released.

Horrified, the businessman told the police that he didn?t have that kind of money, and they were locked down.

The driver who had been inexplicably let off, however, drummed up half of the money from friends living in Chetumal, about BZ$500, and paid the fine to an official in another part of the building. He had come later, and gave the men what seemed to be a receipt, and so they were able to leave Chetumal around 10:30 that night.

The questions the businessman is asking are first, if it was indeed the law in Chetumal that having beer in a plastic cup outside the bar was an offence; why was the vehicle?s driver not similarly charged, and why were the other Mexicans, who also had beer in plastic cups, not charged?

Secondly, why did the bartender give them plastic cups for their beer? Surely he knew the law, so he must have done so deliberately, knowing that his accomplices, the policemen, were waiting outside.

They have the feeling that the whole exercise was simply to extort money from them, said the businessman, because the licence plates for their vehicle proclaimed them to be from Belize, and so, easy prey.

The bartender and the policemen, and the official were in cahoots, and the reason his driver was not charged was so that he could find the money to pay the extortionists. If all of them were jailed, how would the ransom money be found?

The businessman is warning all Belizeans to be aware of these hustling policemen and crooked bartenders in Chetumal, because if they had not been able to find some money from friends there, it is possible that they would have stayed in jail a long time.

It was possible that the following day, when the policemen found out that they really had no money, that they would have been released, but it is also possible, said the businessman, that they would have been held for trial, and the Mexican court system is different from the Belizean court system. They had no ?rights,? and could have spent a long time in jail awaiting trial.

The businessman said that he couldn?t afford to spend any time in jail, which is what the policemen were counting on.

The businessman said that while in lockdown, he had requested a phone call, but the request was ignored. His own phone had been taken from him before he was put in the cell.

We intend to ask the Mexican ambassador for his comments on the incident, and will publish his reply in our next issue of Amandala.