The defection to the PUP of the Belize City Council’s Human Resources Manager, Dale Trujeque, should sound loud warning bells in the head of the Opposition UDP Leader, Hon. Dean O. Barrow. Mr. Trujeque was a candidate in the UDP Albert constituency convention in 2002, and he was the campaign manager for the wildly successful UDP Belize City Council campaign of March 2006. To put it succinctly, Mr. Trujeque was a big man in the UDP.
The indications are that his defection was not a rash one. It was premeditated, because he took taped material along with him to the ruling PUP which is already damaging the UDP. And there will be more.
Mr. Barrow is entitled to be arrogant as a lawyer, because he may be Belize’s best. But the fact that he has never lost an election in his personal Queen’s Square constituency, should not be enough reason for Mr. Barrow to be swell-headed as a politician.
The mistakes Dean Barrow made as UDP Leader in the 2003 general election campaign were egregious. First, he arbitrarily replaced Sydney Fuller as the UDP’s Albert candidate with Marilyn Williams, an attorney. Fuller had won the same UDP Albert constituency convention in which Dale Trujeque competed, and he is the son of an NIP/UDP Albert legend, Theophilus “T” Fuller, who did Mr. Goldson’s ground work in Albert for decades. Miss Williams was badly beaten in the general elections, and has since departed Belize for greener pastures. It is inconceivable that Sydney Fuller could have been more badly beaten than Marilyn Williams was. So, what was the point? What was the sense?
Mr. Barrow then replaced Kenny Morgan as his Pickstock candidate with Diane Haylock. Again, this was an arbitrary move on the UDP Leader’s part. Haylock lost so badly that she was beaten by an independent candidate, Wilfred “Sedi” Elrington. We cannot recall such a thing ever happening to a major party candidate in the modern political history of Belize.
Morgan’s personal loyalty to Dean Barrow was and is laudable. He had shorn his dreadlocks in order to be a more palatable, more bourgeois candidate in Pickstock. When Barrow abruptly pulled the rug out from under him, Morgan lost face in the streets. Kenny has since grown back his locks, and holds a major public relations position in the Belize City Council. Kenny’s continued loyalty to the UDP only makes Mr. Barrow’s Pickstock move look more treacherous.
In the 2003 general elections, both Wilfred Elrington (Pickstock) and his older brother, Hubert, ran as independent candidates. These were traditional UDP stalwarts. Hubert was a UDP area representative for Lake I and a Cabinet Minister in both of the UDP terms of office (1984-1989 and 1993–1998). Sedi was the UDP Pickstock candidate in both 1993 and 1998, and he served as a Cabinet Minister for a time in the 1993–1998 UDP term while in the Senate as Leader of Government Business.
Dean Barrow’s problem with Hubert Elrington is personal. There is no question that Hubert is as anti-PUP as anti-PUP could be. By contrast, consider Said Musa’s attitude towards PUP cohorts who have publicly confronted him, such as Florencio Marin and Mike Espat. There has been complete Musa rapprochement with these erstwhile antagonists. While Mr. Barrow and Sedi Elrington have been reconciled, Hubert Elrington remains a UDP pariah because of Dean Barrow’s lack of humility.
Finally, we will take you back to the key final two weeks of the 2003 general election campaign. Mr. Barrow chose to focus, almost exclusively, on the relatively minor scandals in Cordel Hyde’s Ministry of Education. If it was the case that the UDP knew nothing of the questionable loans involving hundreds of millions in Ralph Fonseca’s Ministry of Finance, then the UDP was not a worthy Opposition.
In his rhetoric, the UDP Leader has been saying for years that the UDP is a shoo-in for the next general elections because the people of Belize are fed up with PUP corruption. That may be so, but 1979 should be a stark reminder to Mr. Barrow, and he was prominently around and about Church Street in 1979, that there is no such thing as a “UDP shoo-in.”
Mr. Trujeque was not the only PUP mole in the UDP. There are others who are on the PUP’s payroll. They will not defect publicly to the PUP, as Trujeque has, but they have been compromised in financial ways which weaken the UDP’s credibility on the Southside. Let Dale Trujeque be a warning, Mr. Barrow. Beware the Ides of March.