Looking back over the last sixty years of Belizean politics, it is difficult not to conclude that the very apogee of Belizean democracy, for whatever it is worth, may have been reached in the national elections of 1954, when adult suffrage was introduced in British Honduras. We say this because, on that April 1954 day when voters voted for eight out of nine PUP candidates across the colony, against heavy British and Anglophile pressure, on that day it seemed that the sky was the limit where the future for natives was concerned.
In the latter part of 1956, however, there was a massive fracture in the leadership of the nationalist PUP, and from that time to the present, the power of the Belizean people has grown less and less, and the power of the special interests has increased in proportion to the weakening of the people.
These strong, wild-looking youth you see on the streets of the old capital, youth who have dedicated themselves to crime, violence and mayhem, are the grandchildren and great grandchildren of those brave and hopeful Belizeans who went to the polls on that famous day in 1954. The grandparents and great grandparents of today’s “gang bangers” worked in the BEC logging works, on the BEC tugboats and at the BEC sawmill. They worked for Bob Turton’s logging and chicle works. They worked at Public Works and on the waterfront. They were fishermen and farmers and butchers and carpenters and tailors and seamstresses and domestic workers and so on and so forth. They had lived under British colonialism, and they wanted out. That was the vote in 1954. But we can see today that something has gone wrong since then.
Today we can see that democracy in Belize is really a kind of oligopoly. What we have here is the rule of the rich. The visible domestic rich are one thing: the invisible global rich are another. The domestic rich and the global rich have been working together in Belize. The sadness of it is that they have used and continued to use the very political party structures which our native people had constructed fifty-five years ago. There is no one Belizean to blame. We Belizeans sold our birthright. We were misled, and we were betrayed.
There is a newspaper being published in Belize for more than a year now which has few paid advertisements and very little circulation. All of us in the newspaper business know that such a publication has to be paid for, to the tune of thousands of dollars each week, by some individual or group which wishes to be anonymous. One of the constants of this newspaper, from creation, is a half page ad each week targeting the Amandala publisher. The other constants, apart from articles attacking the UDP government and the new PUP Leader, are columns, editorials and articles which praise former Prime Minister Said Musa, former Finance Minister Ralph Fonseca, Freetown area representative Francis Fonseca, and attorney Lisa Shoman. The existence of such a publication says a lot about how our “democracy” in Belize has been subverted. It is not the Belizean people who wish for such a publication to exist: it is a special interest. That special interest desires the return of the wealthy, neoliberal wing of the PUP to power.
But it is not even two years since the Belizean people fought with massive determination to oust that said PUP neoliberal wing from power, by means of the ballot. Coming to power on February 7, 2008, was a wealthy, successful attorney whose grandfather was one of the leaders of the pro-British National Party in 1954. The propaganda tactic of the PUP’s neoliberal publication has had them explain whatever Prime Minister Dean Barrow has been doing, by claiming that he is following the advice of Partridge Street. This type of propaganda is considered hogwash in Belize City, but in the countryside and in the districts of Belize, it serves to tarnish the progressive record of this newspaper, because of the known pro-colonial legacy of the UDP and their Leader’s family.
We have hitherto treated the publication of the neoliberal PUP material with the disdain it deserves. We would point out to those Belizeans in the countryside and in the districts, nonetheless, that it is impossible for Amandala to treat the Barrow administration as an enemy when the option is to return some known and indicted kleptomaniacs to power. You know of whom we speak. It’s as simple as that.