We are constantly reminded that in the Belize of 2007, money rules. It appears that the determining factor driving every political decision made by this government is money, or more specifically, how much money the “inside” members of GOB can stuff into their pockets. The Stake Bank-Port Loyola cruise terminal controversy revolves around just that. Actually, it really doesn’t matter to the average Belize City resident which terminal, if any, gets built. Port Loyola and Stake Bank don’t give a damn about the Belizean people, and both projects will provide the usual for the population – a few low-end and low paying menial jobs. Both projects will screw up the environment. Both projects will operate behind a wall of exclusivity, keeping the public out under the guise of “crime control.”
Forget all the crap about “docking facilities,” etc. There appear to be two reasons why the Stake Bank project has GOB’s approval. Stake Bank has his own funds to play with. Port Loyola plays solely with other people’s money. The guy who has his own money to play with, is in a better position to assist politicians to reach their primary goal of amassing as much wealth as is humanly possible during their terms in office, ergo, he’s the favorite. The other reason is that Stake Bank’s location will make it easier for it to be more “exclusive,” which is to say that Belizeans, for the most part, will be excluded! End of that part of the story.
Of course, what GOB won’t discuss is the massive destruction to our coastal environment that such a project will entail. More mangroves will be cut down, further reducing spawning areas and habitats for marine life. What a five- mile causeway capable of handling all kinds of vehicle traffic will do to the sea bed and to the coastal currents that distribute sand and river sediments along the shoreline, is anyone’s guess. No insurance company in their right mind will insure such a development in a hurricane prone country such as ours, so when the inevitable hurricane rips it apart, its investors will try to tap into a major share of the little hurricane relief available, claiming the usual “what’s good for (my) business is good for the country.”
The cruise ship industry is dissatisfied with a lot of what Belize has to offer to its passengers, and the current series of court battles that this issue is generating will further turn them off. Both sets of investors may wind up fighting for control of nothing. I wonder exactly how much money has been spent paying lawyers to defend all of the crap that GOB’s larcenous maneuvers have gotten us into. These guys play with taxpayer money like it is monopoly money, and well it might be for them. If they pay any taxes at all, I’d be surprised.
Forget the “Crime Commission’s” assertion that “crime has declined.” Those “statistics” are worth as much as unemployment statistics from any CARICOM country, GOB statistics that pretend to give an accurate accounting of our national debt, or US Government figures purporting to report the number of Iraqi citizens killed since that war started. Besides, misappropriation of or theft of the people’s money by politicians and their friends doesn’t even appear in crime statistics (that’s because it’s never prosecuted so in reality, it’s not considered a crime), so how can crime stats ever be accurate here anyhow? If the members of that commission really believe their numbers, why don’t they each take a solitary walk on the south side of Belize City after 9 p.m.?
A footnote to the Police. Of course people don’t want to let you into their homes, even if the house is “clean.” Police searches mean at best, the house turned into a complete mess that will take days to fix. Clothes and possessions are thrown all over the place. At worst, property is deliberately destroyed and the occupants may well be beaten, without regard to age, gender or physical condition, and then detained so that the torture can continue at the police station. When the house is finally restored to some sort of order, property, particularly small items like cell phones or cash, may have disappeared forever!
The Police don’t need these tactics “to do their job.” This kind of behavior is intended to humiliate people by asserting the “right” to go through and destroy personal items as though they were of no value or consequence, and the “right” to violate the sanctity of a person’s home. The message is simple. “You have no rights that we are bound to respect, none whatsoever. You are just a lower form of life, like an animal or something.” That is why resistance is building and why one day it will explode into open warfare. People will only take so much.
When Police were given the “right” to dispense with judicial oversight by being allowed to conduct warrant-less searches for “drugs or firearms,” the Police were given permission to ride roughshod over all the Constitutional safeguards against unreasonable search and seizure and the Constitutional protection of the right to privacy. This is a first class example of the danger created by a knee jerk reaction to crime. Crime is a social problem and social problems can’t be solved by force. All the beatings and searches have done nothing to reduce crime, regardless of the Crime Control Commission’s bogus numbers.
Tourism is proving to be no different from “oilism” in some important respects. The kingpins of both industries are primarily foreigners. They have the kind of dollars that make politicians drool at first sight. Other than the occasional Belizean who has somehow managed to amass a small fortune, Belizeans don’t figure in the industry’s key positions. The decisions are made outside Belize. That’s where the serious profits go too. Two industries that could help to create positive change of an enormous magnitude in Belize now become sources of even more wealth for those who are already obscenely wealthy, while the “silent majority,” struggle more every day just to try to break even.
Besides, a tourism based economy is not that different from an agriculture based economy. Both models are extremely vulnerable to outside forces. Economic depression in the US and Europe and/or terrorism can shut down tourism in a heartbeat. We are also dealing with companies in the cruise tourism sector with billions in assets and hundreds of millions in yearly profits. Belize’s yearly budget is about a quarter billion US dollars. Our negotiators must be smart, not greedy, to deal with these guys. Unfortunately, the present crew qualifies for the second characteristic, not the first.
The only person with enough international experience to help us to at least hold our own is out of Cabinet. Why, because he, along with another former Minister, refused to support the UHS bailout. Party discipline apparently takes precedence over good common sense! There is no such thing as a “guided democracy.” “Guided autocracy” is more like it. This is why GOB has gone silent about oil. They’re hoping the rest of us forgot!
We pay for political greed in so many ways. There was a particularly horrific traffic accident September 20th on the Western Highway involving a bus and a delivery truck. There were 24 passengers in the bus; 2 sidemen and a driver in the truck. Six people (as of now) are dead and every person in those vehicles received some degree of injury. Many of those injured were seriously hurt. Although National Transport promised to pay the medical expenses of the injured passengers, I’m not holding my breath. I worked for 10 years in the auto insurance claims field in California from 1983-1993 and I well remember files in which medical expenses soared over the half million US mark; for one person! This is a multi-million dollar accident. I predict that many of the unfortunate passengers will be left in the lurch. Proper treatment for seriously injured victims of vehicle accidents is not available in Belize and recovery, even with the best of treatment, could well take years! Are bus companies required to carry insurance? If so, what are the policy limits per accident and per victim?
The greed factor becomes involved in a couple of ways. There are no traffic patrols on our highways. I’m not talking about checkpoints; they don’t count. In many cases, vehicles aren’t even checked at those checkpoints. A practiced drinker can easily pass through one of those checkpoints even if the Police come out to take a cursory look at the insurance and registration stickers. I’m talking about mobile patrols, patrols that observe dangerous driving and pull those drivers over; anywhere along our highways. They can hide in side roads etc. until some moron flies past at 90 mph or is spotted weaving back and forth or suddenly changing speed for no reason. The latter is a classic sign of a drunk driver.
Sure it will cost money, but that’s why we pay taxes, for services! This is where all the money that floats away in unnecessary litigation and deals that reek of favoritism and kickbacks hurts us. People are dying like flies on our highways. There are too many drivers in this world who simply don’t give a rat’s ass about how they drive. A few expensive tickets, jail time for those imbeciles who insist on driving while drunk or high and a points system that suspends and revokes the licenses of the worst offenders will make those kinds of people straighten up. These cretins won’t see the light without enforcement. People are like that anyhow; if laws aren’t being enforced they do what they want, even if, as it is in this case, the laws are there to protect their lives along with the lives of their fellow citizens. This is where strict and impartial police enforcement would be welcomed.
We should have a traffic school option for first offenders. Most US states offer this option. Your first ticket is suspended along with the fine, but you spend Saturday and Sunday in a state run class in which you spend a lot of time looking at the carnage that traffic accidents create. The rest of traffic school consists of a crash course in safe driving. At the end of the second session, you have to pass a little test. If you fail, you can come back one more time next weekend and try again, or you can take your medicine. The medicine is quite bitter; the points for the offense stay on your record for 3 years and your insurance rates sky! Accumulate enough points and the State Department of Motor Vehicles invites you to a compulsory hearing where you have to convince them not to suspend or revoke your license.
These are some of the things that all the missing and misappropriated money could have paid for. Our highways are in urgent need of serious repair and of upgrading. Since the spate of road building during the mid to late nineties – all of it paid for by grants from abroad incidentally – the roads are being allowed to deteriorate, again. Edges need to be repaired, roads need to be widened at dangerous curves, guardrails need to be used at both the edges and centerlines of dangerous stretches and lighting needs to be installed along more and more of the highways, not only at settlements.
Independence Day has come and gone. I didn’t feel at all like celebrating. How can we call ourselves “independent” when Belizeans own almost none of their country and even the money to stop us from killing ourselves on the nation’s highways has been stolen? Think about that one for a while.