Marie-Therese Belisle Nweke, a world class journalist, writer, and political observer/analyst, has said to me recently that it is not Guatemala that we home-based Belizeans should be worried about, but Taiwan. Her thesis is that the United States will eventually allow China to absorb Taiwan, whereupon the Taiwanese will migrate to Belize and take us over.
The U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is on a visit to Jamaica this week. We have been hearing for years that the Chinese have gotten their hooks into Jamaica, whose most important international product is its bauxite. The U.S. is concerned about the Chinese challenge to American hegemony.
Many years ago, in 1798, the British power base in the Caribbean was in Jamaica, and it was from Jamaica that they sent reinforcements to help the settlers in Belize defend themselves from a naval armada/invasion sent by the Spanish from Merida. Presumably, it was also from Jamaica that the imperial British sent the British West India Regiment to help the settlers fight off the Icaiche Maya, led by Marcos Canul, who was killed in Orange Walk in 1872. Canul’s death appears to have ended the Icaiche offensive.
I have no idea what young Belizeans here think about our situation today. When I was the age of today’s young Belizeans in the 1960s, I knew that Belizeans who were my present age, the septuagenarians of The Jewel, were focused on the Guatemalan threat. So were we, their grandchildren.
But there has been a massive migration of Belizeans to the United States in the last half century. I don’t think younger Belizeans, those in the 18 to 30 age range both at home and abroad, worry too much about the Guatemalan claim to Belize and the upcoming ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
My impression is that Belizeans have done well for themselves in the United States, but the return of Donald Trump to the American presidency has been creating an uproar both inside the U.S. and, indeed, all over planet earth. What we see in the Trump administration, among other things, is an attempt to purge the U.S. of immigrants of color. It does not appear to me that African-Americans are that concerned about the Trump policies in that regard, because they believe that immigrants from places like Belize and the Caribbean have been taking jobs away from them.
President Trump’s political base is comprised of the so-called “red states,” which are really the old slaveholding states which fought against the Union in an attempt to maintain chattel slavery in the U.S. This was the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865. White supremacists in the U.S. today fear that the superpower will become a nation where whites are a racial minority within the next three decades.
More than two centuries ago, shortly after the Haitians had successfully fought against French slavery and declared themselves an independent republic in 1804, a man named Simon Bolivar was the hero of those peoples in South America who were fighting against the colonial rule of the Spanish monarchy. Bolivar was materially assisted by Haitian leaders.
In our time, Hugo Chavez was a Venezuelan leader who took Bolivar as his hero. A decade ago, Chavez was using Venezuelan oil wealth to help countries like Belize in the Caribbean and Latin America. Bolivar had viewed the slaveholding American South as eventually the most deadly enemy of the people of the Caribbean and Latin America. Chavez was using Venezuela’s oil money to help those nations in the Western Hemisphere who are dominated by America.
But, Chavez died young, too young, and Venezuela fell into financial crisis. Belize had taken hundreds of millions from Chavez. And we have been taking huge gobs of money from Taiwan for decades. So, we have basically been living above our means, and Marie-Therese is suggesting that there will be a price Belizeans will have to pay for the Taiwan money.
Her thesis is intriguing, and all I can add to that thesis is that the world is in a topsy-turvy state since Trump took over on January 20 of this year, and where might had always been considered right in many circles, today might appears also to be truth, a truth which may change life as we have known it in Belize.