Foul murder continues to plague our nation, just as it is doing in a number of other countries in our region. A 2019 UN global study on homicide said that young men in the Americas are at especially high risk of being murdered. The report said the homicide rate for young men in the Americas aged 18 to 29 is “estimated at 46 per 100,000”, while in Europe and Asia the homicide rate has declined—in Europe “by 63 per cent since 2002 and by 38 per cent since 1990” and in Asia “by 36 per cent since 1990.” In desperation, the governments in Honduras and El Salvador have blocked out the protests of human rights activists and introduced draconian measures to stem the violence raging across the land. In Belize the best news we have is that the latest statistics from the Belize Crime Observatory show that our murder total for last year was—not as horrible as it was the year before.
How we accepted a yearly increase of this crime until we reached the shocking state we are in at this time, is hard to comprehend. How did we descend to this state? One of the facts that stands out is that after independence we stopped solving murder cases, stopped punishing people who commit the crime.
Amandala couldn’t find any studies to show the relationship between unsolved/unpunished murders and the murder rate, but we can rely on our eyes, those who choose to see. When the state fails to solve murders and punish murderers, people live in fear, and they are tempted to take matters into their own hands, to exact revenge. When we stopped solving/punishing people for the crime of murder, our homicide rate began to increase, until we reached the point at which we are now: one of the most violent places on earth.
Boledo— another in a string of bad contracts by our governments
The Brads Boledo contract of 2020, which had already made it onto the list of incredibly bad financial deals our governments have made since 1998, got more sour in Belizean stomachs with the report this week that a company registered in the offshore haven, Cayman Islands, had acquired shares in Brads. Belizeans were displeased about the contents of the 2020 contract, and displeased that we didn’t know who the parties in the Brads group were and couldn’t find out because the company was registered overseas. And now we are told that Brads has sold shares to a company which has the right to pull out the Belize-UK Bilateral Investment Treaty of 1982 that was used by a certain party to whip us to our knees when we were displeased with the management at BTL, and wanted to get our company back.
If the UDP’s 2008-2012 administration hadn’t seen the possibilities, that the government and people could make a lot more money off the Boledo, then after the first ten-year contract (2009), after all the Belizean people were saying, and what the main opposition, PUP, were charging in the House of Representatives, it had to have seen the light—that the Boledo is a gold mine, the taxes we were getting were too small, and if we didn’t up it significantly when the contract expired, the only other option was for the government to run the game as it had before.
Some say as a young country we must expect to have some teething pains. Then the UDP 2008-2012 might be excused for naiveté. The group that got the contract, though, having been involved with Boledo sales for years, had to have known it was a gift, had to have known that the company’s shareholders were scoring a major wapi on the poor Belizean people. If they are legitimate business folk, after that second contract they must think our leaders are real fools.
Belizeans don’t know for sure who Brads is. Suspicious Belizeans believe that the second sweet ten- year contract given out just months before the last general election was a crony deal and that at least one of the cronies is related to the leader of government in the last UDP administration. It’s a plum alright, and it might be solely a prize for an individual. It might also be the purse that funds, controls the out-of-office United Democratic Party.
It’s a lucrative contract, this 10-year control of the Boledo. If it’s for the party, the UDP might try and defend what it has done—not with the sick excuse that they copied the page from the PUP 1998-2003 script, but with the justification that every democracy needs a strong opposition party, and for an opposition party to be strong, it has to be well-funded. To a man and woman, Belizeans will say ‘hear, hear’ to the argument that our country needs a strong opposition party—but its support mustn’t come from shameful deals with our property. If the UDP had enacted proper campaign financing laws while it was in power, it wouldn’t need massive funding to be viable.
The Chairperson of the Lotteries Committee, Ms. Narda Garcia, has charged that Brads has breached a number of the terms of its contract, and that the company needs to explain why its contract shouldn’t be revoked. Former Prime Minister, Dean Barrow, the man who was in charge of the country when Brads got the contract, now has a contract with Brads to defend them in court. Barrow says the present government is about a vendetta, that it is acting unfairly, and that extra taxes that the GOB is seeking to extract from the company could drive it out of business. Mr. Dean Barrow has warned that national coffers are going to pay a very steep price if the government missteps, tries to wrest back the Boledo.
We shouldn’t be shocked by anything our leaders do anymore. After independence, our leaders dumped ethics and morality and began asking, is it legal?
These kinds of minds that sold the management contract of our lottery to unidentified parties, parties it is impossible for us to know, parties who could be “good people” or could be money launderers/drug runners/murderers, Belizeans don’t understand these kinds of minds. But we understand the impact they have on our standard of living. It’s easy to explain our poverty – these leaders we honor with a seat in the House of Representatives, they serve the interests of others, not ours.
Unfortunately, nothing we say about what they did to our Boledo fazes them. These are old games these politicians play, and they don’t mind that we know they are doing us wrong. They know they can wait us out; they know that someday we will tire of the government we have, and in our disaffection we won’t mind turning back to the one in waiting that mismanaged our Boledo.