by Colin Hyde

It’s interesting news this week—one judge ruling that Belize should compensate some young men who were held under an SOE in 2020, and one judge saying it was okay for the country to detain the men because of the troubles at the time. Lawyer R Bradley and Lawyer L Banner are in glee about the judgment that calls for the men to be compensated, which I guess means they think the judge who said it was right and proper, missed his call on this one.

I have questions about 2020. It was in March that the pandemic was declared, and for much of the rest of the year, we were either under full SOE, or something like it. I can’t figure out how we had 102 murders that year. True, that’s 32 less than in 2019, but even with a nightly curfew, and police on every street corner, we were busy snuffing out the lives of our brothers. 

I checked with the Belize Crime Observatory to see what stats they had on acts of homicide during this particular period, but no data came up. I’m thinking I will have to go through the headlines in the news transcripts of 5 and 7 to find out the breakdown of murders for each month that year. Did we have like a hundred murders by mid-March, when the pandemic was declared? What the hell was going on in Belize in 2020 that even while we were so much under police rule, people were busy killing other people?   

SB UDP persistence gives EBD opportunity to correct a bad error

The lawyers must love the persistence of this UDP faction that was resoundingly rejected at the polls on March 12, because there’s pay in that, and the majority of that breed hotly pursue the material world. Bah, if lawyers sit around on weekend evenings discussing cases such as these, their lives must be very boring. Bah, if there are professors at our colleges who serve up topics like these for our young minds to mull over, that would be so disappointing. Some things, bah, some people too, should get no more than a passing glance.

But, it is a rare ill wind that blows no good, and this challenge of the Elections and Boundaries Department (EBD), and the Commission, for the handling of a UDP mess, an internal mess, reminded me to pour out more on the EBD’s incorrect reporting of the March 12 results. We’ve heard that erring is human; hmm, some of us do more of that than others; some of us live in a permanent state of erring. But the guilt is permanent only if the rest of us are lax. Hurray, the correcting pen, the white-out can be used to put matters right.

Before I go on, I’m reminded that on page 116 of Kathy Esquivel’s Still Waters, there is one, or maybe two errors. That important book will have a second and third edition, and so on, and I’m giving the publisher a little help here. In other countries their books, everything they do— books, movies, music — come with a battery of editors. You know editors are to die for. But dehn noh come cheap. In Belize you are lucky if you can afford one.

The Still Waters writer referred to Bill Lindo as the brother of Dean Lindo, the Minister of Natural Resources in the 1984-89 UDP government. She said that Bill was one of those folks who were getting lucrative logging contracts from Dean. I know that Bill’s dad, Jimmy, was into logging; and I’m pretty sure around that time he had an operation in the Toledo District. I remember Bill the entrepreneur had his eyes on rice production, and dredging too. It’s possible he was also into logging, but the bet is the man in the crosshairs was Brother Jimmy.

Returning to our EBD, which tried to make sense of an impossible situation; when the tallies were completed, they tripped up by publishing the Shyne Barrow UDP with 23,739 votes and the Tracy Panton UDP with 13,237. Somebody said numbers don’t lie; well, sometimes they need support to tell a true story. A story goes with those numbers, and it would have been better that the EBD not report them, because they couldn’t stand without explanations and asterisks.

In the March 12 general election, the UDP did not contest in 4 of the 31 divisions. There were 14 divisions where there were single UDP candidates. In Collet, UDP Shyne put up a candidate against UDP Tracy, but the Shyne candidate changed his mind. In Corozal Bay, the UDP Shyne candidate reportedly decided at the last moment to run under UDP Tracy. In the other 12 divisions, the candidates, reportedly UDP Shyne, all or nearly all were endorsed by UDP Tracy.

In 13 divisions, a Shyne UDP went up against a Tracy UDP, and in all 13, Tracy UDP’s trounced Shyne UDP’s. In those 13 divisions, the Tracy UDP got 11,735 votes, while the Shyne UDP got 1,162. If you care to count, that’s 10 to 1, a blowout. You know there’s a serious math problem in Belize, and it’s not only at the level of the PSE. UDP Shyne, Shyne included, got blown out at the polls, 10 to 1; but the UDP says to hell with the 10, we’ll take the 1 to be our leader. Bah, we’re terrible at math. But roll out the red carpet for litigation; give it up for palabras.

Whoa there, the EBD needs to apply the white-out to its report, because the real story is the reverse of what those numbers say. 

Smart PUP have found a way to disappear the sewer pond

We know the hurdles associated with remaking PBL to serve as a cruise tourism port, and they are quite high – proper disposal of dredged material, prevention of dredged material from settling on coral and silting up the sewer pond, the tons of smoke that would envelope Belize City when a ship is in port and the wind is blowing from the southeast and south, and the agh, aesthetics of the Belize City sewer pond in the vista.

Give it up for the creative PUP; I believe they’ve got the solution for the sewer pond, which is the first thing the good tourists would see when they step on the pier out front there. It’s not a giant curtain! If you were thinking a giant blue and white curtain to block the view, no; the PUP has grown past most things rudimentary. No more axe and paddle for this crowd, and nostalgia; this crowd is into E-government, touch button, laptop, iPhone. 

Say no to a blue and white curtain, give way to the new thing in town: it is AI to save the day. Robot sailors will man boats on the “pond” on tourist days; robots will be on skis, and there’ll be water wheels and slides with dozens of robots a-frolicking, the whole festive lot. But some things about the PUP will never change. The devil noh change ih skin. Because of the DNA, all the robots will be painted blue and white. Whee, look at that lee blue and white robot di henkindoala! Of course, there’ll be happy pink, orange and yellow flags and balloons, because they are good for the optics on a lake of blue and green, and blue and white robots.   

Ooh, when the tourists see all that excitement happening there, they’ll want to skip their tours with Yoni, Greenwood, and David. But not to fret, security will be tight. And the road to the pond abuzz with water sports will be unpaved, and with craters, to discourage those who live to intafayr. Score a big point there for Cabinet. For the ambitious scheme which couldn’t fly under Waterloo, they’ve only got three more hurdles to cross. (This is satire, of course.)