Don Hector Silva, a man gifted with a truly remarkable mind for his age (he’s around 90), was doing a lot of talking on PLUS TV last week, and the interim host, Kerm Thimbriel, was lapping it all up.

    The thing is that Don Hector was so enthusiastic, he spoke authoritatively about the movements and incidents of 1969, and referred to the late Louis Sylvester and the late Fred Hunter, People’s United Party (PUP) Cabinet Ministers of that era, as heroes for their role in fighting off whatever was the threat to the party and the country.   

    The problem is that no one who knows the real ever, ever speaks about 1969, about PAC and RAM, about the slaughter of the students in Mexico City in October of 1968, the Walter Rodney matter at the University in Jamaica around the same time, and about the ideological issues which sprang up in the region.

    Don Hector also said that the Guatemalan guerrilla leaders, Yon Sosa and Turcios Lima, posed a real threat to the Guatemalan government around this time.

    Now the primary people who should have informed younger generations of Belizeans about these matters over the decades are the Rt. Hon. Said Musa, who was Prime Minister of Belize from 1998 to 2008, and Assad Shoman, a PUP Cabinet Minister from 1979 to 1984, who has been the energy and the brain behind Belize’s entry into the International Court of Justice (ICJ) arbitration with respect to the claim Guatemala has argued that it has to the territory of Belize.

    But Musa and Shoman, who were appointed by PUP Premier George Price to the Senate in 1974 after they were unsuccessful PUP general election candidates in the October 1974 general election, have never spoken publicly about the Ad Hoc demonstration, about PAC and RAM, and those matters which may be somewhat ideological in nature. 

    In fact, after the PUP lost power for the first time in 1984, and both Musa (Fort George) and Shoman (Cayo North) lost their seats, it would seem that Musa’s subsequent political career, in which he was closely aligned with Ralph Fonseca, indicated that he had become neoliberal in thinking. 

    Shoman left the PUP after the 1984 defeat and led the activist intellectual group, Society for the Promotion of Education and Research (SPEAR), for some years before he migrated to Havana, Cuba, where he has lived for some three decades or so.  

     Because it was Shoman who replaced Don Hector as the PUP candidate in Cayo North, after Don Hector had starred for a couple decades, it is necessary for Kerm to get some of the other side of this story.

    UBAD, under my presidency, was peripheral to this clash, “peripheral” I would say because I was a political innocent compared to Shoman and Musa, Belizeans of Palestinian descent who had spent five years studying law in London between roughly 1963 and 1968.

    I am calling for this conversation because it seems to me that this peaceful little Belize where I grew up is headed, seemingly inexorably, to violent class struggle because of the ever widening gap between the elitist rich and our poverty-stricken masses. In British Honduras when I was growing up, all of us saw ourselves as poor or middle class. Today, there are mighty oligarchs who run the show here, and they are often ostentatious with their wealth. We do have a sort of democracy which allows the masses always to hope for change at election time. 

    But the world itself sometimes appears to me as it did in 1968 — terribly tumultuous. The United States boasts of its mighty democracy and lectures some specific countries in the region about their lack of said democracy. But something happened in the American capital of Washington, D. C., on January 6, 2021, that indicates a fracturing of the vaunted American democracy. The more the present hearings about January 6 continue, the more it appears that the legally elected government of the U.S. cannot impose its legitimate will upon Donald Trump and his forces.

    The United States survived Watergate in 1973. The sitting president, Richard Nixon, was forced to resign because the American democratic structure held firm. At the beginning of the Watergate hearings, Richard Nixon seemed awesomely powerful. The American media, because they want to understand January 6 better, are taking prolonged looks back at the history of the Watergate drama.

     Younger generations of Belizeans need to know the issues sparking confrontation and provoking division at the Cabinet level in the PUP between 1969 and 1984. This is because there are developments taking place in The Jewel today which have exposed a level of greed around which is dangerous. 

    And this is not only a problem at the ruling party level. Inside the United Democratic Party (UDP) there has emerged a family which now sits on Mount Olympus financially. Belize is not the way it used to be. 

    The long and short of it is, Kerm: there are views which are at odds with Don Hector’s.