By Marie-Therese Belisle Nweke

Continued from last week issue of Amandala dated Friday, June 27, 2025

What has been the role of various Belizean governments since Independence in all this? What pragmatic and effective steps have successive governments taken to safeguard Belize’s borders from Guatemala’s destructive illegal incursions and foreign settlements? Since Belize is a relatively sparsely populated country with the bulk of its current population being Central American Latinos, and possibly partial in their sympathy to their kith and kin in Guatemala, Belize urgently needs a new population reset. This could take the form of around 250, 000 immigrant families from established and lucrative farming communities from outside the region, who would be provided with leased government lands along the nation’s borders. They would serve as an effective buffer wall of farming communities deterring the most intrepid Guatemalan interloper. They would not be subsistence farmers, but must provide for Belize a solid industrial agricultural export base of finished products, not raw agricultural ones.

Belize has also over many years experienced several attempts by Guatemala to invade and even occupy it by amassing troops on its borders. In 1948, Guatemala decided to invade and annex Belize. Britain, therefore, sent two companies from the 2nd Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment. One company which was conveyed to the border found that whatever Guatemalan force had amassed there had swiftly melted away. However, a company was permanently stationed in Belize City in readiness for an attack.

Then in 1957, the British deployed a company of the Worcestershire Regiment to Belize and carried out jungle training, as a response to new, imminent Guatemalan threats of military invasion. The following year, fighters from Guatemala calling themselves the Belize Liberation Army entered southern Belize and hoisted their Guatemalan flag. Again, Britain immediately deployed a platoon, exchanged fire with the fighters and arrested around two dozen of them.

In 1972, British intelligence discovered that Guatemala was about to invade Belize. Immediately, the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, its air wing, Phantom FG.1s and Blackburn Buccaneers, as well as 8,000 troops were on their way to Belize. Although Guatemala’s troops had amassed on Belize’s border, they stopped short of invading. Again in 1975, Guatemala brought its troops by Belize’s borders. Britain, this time, responded with its own troops. These were accompanied with a battalion of 105mm field guns, surface-to-air missiles, six fighter jets and a frigate.

Britain at no time was playacting, and fully understood the menace Guatemala has unwaveringly presented to Belize. Today, the British no longer have their soldiers in Belize. It is a given that Belize’s tiny and modestly equipped Defence Force and the other small pseudo paramilitary formations it has, can do very little in the face of a large military invasion by Guatemala. Guatemala has the most powerful military in Central America. Plus, it is not only a client state of Israel, but the most favoured and long-standing ally of the US in Latin America. At one point in time during the Cold War, Guatemala was believed to have turned its back on the US and moved close to the Soviet Union, to the point that it was claimed that the Russians used Guatemala to transport weapons to Cuba. This threatened US interests. So, to break this rapprochement, America is believed to have promised Belize to Guatemala when the British left. This possibly explains why the Webster Proposals were heavily weighted in Guatemalan favour under the Lyndon Johnson presidency.

Nor does Belize have reservists to fall back on. But instead of going out of its way to strengthen further ties with Britain, for whatever it is worth, Belize has shortsightedly decided to cut its last links with Britain by eventually removing its governor-general who represents Charles III of Britain who, incidentally, is merely a ceremonial head of state, and becoming a republic. But Belize’s politicians and the Belizean people forget that they just cannot afford to behave like those former British Caribbean islands which chose to become republics. Nobody is claiming them! They neither have land borders to protect and preserve, nor land that envious enemy states are trespassing on, and natural resources which are routinely looted.

The Belize I once knew is no longer “soro soke” — bold and speaking Truth to Power. In fact, it has become “woto woto”, taking the butt of relentless attacks down the years from Guatemala. Whether we like to face the reality of what we have become or not, we are now generally increasingly complacent, indolent, and parochial. Belize thinks that relying on regional and international entities such as those earlier highlighted, world opinion, and the validity and rightness of its cause, plus indulging in pointless diplomatic finesse with Guatemala, is the way to go. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Long ago, and now it is rather late, Belize should have looked around and diligently searched for a worthy mentor to secure a Defence Agreement, possibly (though I do not like this for various reasons) even with a military base on Belizean soil. In such matters, there is always a quid pro quo, but the gain is respect from the enemy who will think twice before invading Belize and overrunning it. This mentor would need to possess a military capability far greater than Guatemala’s. Moreover, the mentor would be so loaded with “Maximum Respect” in the neighbourhood, that Guatemala would eventually conclude that its days of moving out of its lane had come to a precipitous, but final end. In the meantime, a fairly secure Belize would develop, expand and grow its potential to the greatest extent, build an industrial and highly technological and vocational base, with a well-educated and rounded citizenry, and in the fullness of time an effective 21st century military.

I shall neither go into the demerits of Guatemala’s deliberately misleading reading of the Wyke-Aycinena Treaty of 1859 with Great Britain, and that of 1931. It is obvious to all except the most prejudiced, or the semi-illiterate, that the British at no time had cheated the Guatemalans. Regarding the road that was supposed to be built, but was never built, there was no mention in the 1859 Treaty of who would pay, who would build this road, and where it was to be built between Belize City, the capital of Belize – then British Honduras—and Guatemala’s capital. Wyke, the British negotiator who himself included this section, understood it to mean that half of the road was to be built by Britain and the other half by Guatemala. Despite the number of years spent on working out the implementation of this clause on the road, by 1869 all negotiations had stalled.

Suffice it is to add that I do believe, after examining all the historical and legal facts and noting Guatemala’s decades of reluctance to go to the ICJ,  the entire raison d’etre on which Guatemala makes its claim, as publicly stated by its government and in several of these propaganda videos on YouTube, does not hold much, if any, water. This presumptuous overreach by Guatemala of persistently, for over a century and a half, laying a blatantly illegitimate claim to Belize, irrespective of which dictator is in power, should make every right-thinking Belizean never, ever take Guatemala and its people for granted.

Lest they forget, all this mad talk about a road which both Britain and Guatemala reneged in building, and that Guatemala is the inheritor of territory lost to a former colonial power, Spain,  and therefore owns all of former British Honduras, now scaled down to 53 percent, is all that is Guatemala’s case. I suppose that, since Guatemala goes back to when Spain owned large parts of the Americas, Mexico could still think it could claim Texas due to maps showing that it inherited Texas from Spain, since Texas was once owned by Spain. Should every Latin American nation take this “inheriting from Spain” route as Guatemala is doing, and grab for itself what they believe Spain had owned, they would all be laying claims on each other. 

To be Continued