It has been relatively peaceful in Belize since the government, in desperation, pulled out the big stick SOE (State of Emergency) in Belize City and parts of the Cayo District in June this year. That, no one can deny. There have been murders that shocked the nation since: in July something went wrong in a group that was socializing in Cotton Tree, and one member of that group pulled out a gun and fatally shot two of the party; in early August a crazed individual who had been on a mission to kill someone, and failed, turned on a fisherman who was nearby and fired shots that killed him. There have been other murders in the country in the close to 60 days that the SOE has been in force, but the flow of blood in the streets has slowed considerably.
Last year Belize’s murder rate was the lowest it had been in two decades, and the Minister of Home Affairs, Hon. Kareem Musa, and the Commissioner of Police, Chester Williams, while taking bows for the success compared to previous years, told the nation that while they knew it would be difficult, they were hopeful about continuing the trend. But early in 2024, in March, they had to pull out an SOE because of an explosion of violent crime; and two months after that SOE ended, they had to go to the House of Representatives for approval of another one, on June 24. The latest SOE would have ended in July, after 30 days had elapsed, had the Minister and the Commissioner not lobbied successfully for it to be extended a further 60 days.
There have been clamors against the SOE from a number of corners. A reported near 100 individuals were removed from the streets in this recent SOE—100 individuals who were deprived of their constitutional rights because the Police Department BELIEVES they are dangerous criminals. If numbers tell the story, they, or most of them, are. Since the SOE, murders, violent crimes, have decreased significantly. The trend indicates that if the SOE were to remain in effect until the end of the year, the Minister and the Commissioner would be joined by the entire country as they celebrate a historic drop in murders in the second half of 2024.
It’s a hard place for Belize. We love a news cycle dominated with questions about the government’s acquisition of some extremely high-priced land for the new hospital, and discussions about a visit by Laura Elena Carillo, Mexico’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs; and Belize City Mayor Bernard Wagner’s latest push to modernize Belize City. We are the inheritors of a “tranquil haven.” How in hell did we devolve into this murderous state?
The SOE is a last-resort tool to reestablish order. The Commissioner “might want to” extend it again – it does make life a lot less stressful for his department; but government can’t possibly add more months to the present one. We have exhausted the SOE—some would say we have abused it—and now we have to come up with some other means to ensure the peace.
How in hell did we get here? The facts are that we had the conditions, three notable ones being poverty/poor wealth distribution, involvement in the illegal drug trade, and a justice system that stopped working. Prior to independence, Belizeans, except for a select few close to the colonial rulers group, shared more or less the same standard of living. Since we dumped the mixed economy system for a more capitalist one, beginning in 1984, the wealth disparity in the nation has increased markedly. Relative to our economy, there are a few Belizeans who are obscenely wealthy, a good-sized group that is well-off but claim they are not, the masses living on the edges, and a number who are desperately poor and without hope of seeing their finances improve legally.
Around the time we turned capitalist, some of our political leaders and police became corrupted by cartel bosses in South America and their agents in Belize who used our land and sea space to ship cocaine from South America to the USA. For the crumbs from the mega-million-dollar illegal trade, desperate, hungry Belizeans found employ with the big drug bosses, and set up comparatively tiny drug operations themselves. The mix of poverty without hope and the illegal drug trade is a concoction for violence from which no one escapes. Murders in Belize have been increasing since the 1980s, and some years have seen us ranked among the most murderous states in the world.
The justice system shouldn’t be among the root causes for violence. It is. As murders increased, convictions in our courts decreased. Our justice system is stacked in favor of the individual, not the state. The accused in Belize don’t have to prove innocence; the state has to prove guilt. A guilty verdict, which is not the easiest thing to get in murder cases, became the exception, with upwards of 90% of the cases the police brought to court ending in acquittals.
It isn’t often in just, stable states that the police place a charge of murder on the wrong party. It happens, as in all human systems, but not frequently. The US has been held up as a country where there have been many wrongful charges in murder cases; but the US is, or for years has been, an unjust state. For two centuries, a white supremacist class which has ruled the US did not have or seldom had the best intentions for non-white groups. White supremacist America did not routinely bring false murder charges against its white citizens.
With justice in the courts almost dead, families and friends of murder victims turned to the streets for justice. Many believe that the majority of individuals caught in the SOE net are guilty of extremely serious crimes and have escaped the justice system. If the men in the net were interviewed, most of them would share the same story: poverty with little hope, the illegal drug trade, and the state’s failure to deliver justice for them and their families for friends and relatives who were murdered. When the state fails to deliver justice, there is retaliation in the streets, until the state resorts to the SOE to save itself from collapse.
The SOE will end soon. For 30 years we’ve had this problem, and we haven’t made much progress. That’s what two SOEs in a little over half a year says. The conditions that caused some to go far astray haven’t gone away. If we will stay clear of the bad old days, the root causes have to be addressed.
It is fair odds that some of these individuals in the SOE net are marked by the streets for crimes they are believed to have committed, and fair odds that some individuals harbor revenge in their hearts for fallen friends or relatives. The authorities must punish crime, and insist that that is the right of the state alone. The tough economic issues have to be addressed. Business people and civic leaders in the deprived areas of the country need to come together to find economic solutions. Our leaders must increase their efforts to reduce foul murder in the illegal drug trade. They are all tall tasks. We have to win. For 30 years all we’ve had is failure.