“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this (Belize) …”

– RICHARD II, Act II, sc. I, 50

“Deals for oilfields can be as opaque as the stuff that is pumped from them. But when partners fall out and go to court, light is sometimes shed on the bargaining process – and what it exposes is not always pretty. That is certainly true in the tangled case of OPL245, a massive Nigerian offshore block with as much as 9 billion barrels of oil – enough to keep all of Africa supplied for seven years.

“After years of legal tussles, in 2011 Shell, in partnership with ENI of Italy, paid a total of $1.3 billion for the block. The Nigerian government acted as a conduit for directing most of that money to the block’s original owner, a shadowy local company called Malabu Oil and Gas. Two middlemen hired by Malabu, one Nigerian, one Azerbaijani, then sued the firm separately in London – in the High Court and in an arbitration tribunal, respectively – claiming unpaid fees for brokering the deal.”

– pg. 63, THE ECONOMIST, June 15, 2013

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the United Democratic Party (UDP), which first came to power in 1984, has overall won four separate terms of office, and is presently in power in Belmopan.

It is of interest that the year of the UDP’s founding – 1973, was also the year when Chilean president Salvador Allende, the first Marxist to come to power in a Latin American country through democratic elections, was overthrown in a military rebellion led by General Augusto Pinochet. In the Allende/Pinochet drama, the roles of the Richard Nixon government of the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the American corporate giant AT&T, are all worthy of study, analysis, and indeed, investigation.

Chile under Pinochet became the country where the neoliberal development philosophy developed at the University of Chicago during the 1960s with Professor Milton Friedman as its most high profile economics guru, would be implemented in its most naked version, and the price paid by the Chilean people would be much torture, much bloodshed, and much suffering.

For countries like Chile and Belize, what neoliberalism means is the country’s becoming a part of the globalized economy. The nation’s markets are thrown open to international business through free trade, the nation’s industries and companies are privatized, and raw, unfettered, capitalist competition becomes the order of the day. The nation’s government becomes a facilitator for foreign investors instead of a protector of the country’s masses, and the visuals of prosperity become striking in the form of modern buildings, flashy supermarkets, late model cars and a wealthy, ostentatious class of national bourgeoisie. The downside of neoliberalism is that the masses of the people experience crushing poverty to the extent of misery. But the nation is considered free and democratic and progressive by the world’s business leaders and experts.

It is only a people who have been deceived or overpowered who would willingly choose neoliberalism as their economic development philosophy, because under neoliberalism the masses of the people have nowhere to turn really: their government no longer protects them, because a neoliberal Third World government is the tool of foreign investors and in the service of the multilateral financial institutions which are the instruments of international white supremacy.

The UDP was Belize’s first neoliberal party. It began with a front group called the Unity Congress, financed from New York City, which held a series of meetings in early 1973 with representatives from the People’s Development Movement (PDM), the National Independence Party (NIP), and the Liberal Party. In 1973, the most powerful Opposition group on the ground was the UBAD Party, and so representatives of UBAD were invited to the Unity Congress meetings. The UBAD beliefs, however, as loose as they were, constituted the opposite of neoliberalism, and the Unity Congress turned out to be UBAD’s death knell: it was in the Unity Congress that UBAD first divided, and later died.

From the retrospective viewpoint of 2013, it is not difficult to see that the PUP’s Rt. Hon. George Price and the NIP’s Hon. Philip Goldson were very similar national leaders. They had both helped to found the nationalist, union-driven People’s United Party (PUP) in 1950, and both men were spiritual in their personal lives as opposed to being materialistic. Both Mr. Price and Mr. Goldson were very protective of the masses of the Belizean people.

In The Economist issue of June 15, 2013, there is a three- page article on an oil deal which involved Shell, ENI of Italy, and representatives of the Nigerian government. The magazine refers to it as the “tangled case of OPL245, a massive Nigerian offshore block with as much as 9 billion barrels of oil – enough to keep all of Africa supplied for seven years.”

If Belize is to be saved from the rapacities of neoliberalism, then Belize will need for our educated citizens, at home and abroad, to stand for Belize. This newspaper began as an organ of UBAD, and UBAD was not founded by educated Belizeans: it was founded by roots Belizeans who were sincere and serious. There is, however, a limit to how far one can go without education. One cannot understand the business of oil without being able to read long articles, such as the aforementioned in The Economist, which give the experiences of oil producing countries like Nigeria, where government and crony corruption have resulted in a skewed development wherein ruling and connected elite become exceedingly wealthy while the masses of the people wallow in miserable poverty. In the neoliberal setting, oil brings cruel, crazy corruption with it. It is only by informing itself that the Belizean people can escape the oil trap. It will be very difficult, but we must believe it is possible. If we don’t believe it is possible, then surrender is the option. And, surrender is not an option.

Power to the people. Power in the struggle.