Following their narrow, upset defeat in the June 1993 general elections, the People’s United Party (PUP) leadership made a decision to seek a political relationship with the Kremandala chairman, Evan X Hyde. X Hyde agreed to that closer relationship, which led to the election of his second son, Cordel, in a 1994 Independence Hall convention to chair the PUP’s Lake Independence constituency.
At the specific time this closer relationship between the PUP and Evan X Hyde was taking place, Richard “Dickie” Bradley was an absolute talk show superstar on KREM Radio. Unbeknownst to Kremandala and the Belizean people, however, Dickie Bradley, an attorney, had already decided to give his political and business loyalty to the Said Musa/Ralph Fonseca combine. Also unbeknownst to Kremandala and the Belizean people, Mr. Musa, a socialist and nationalist in his Ad Hoc Committee/UBAD/PAC young manhood, had become a neoliberal capitalist and globalist. Whether Mr. Musa’s philosophical turn had been influenced by his immediate family and/or Ralph Fonseca is not clear, but for sure Said Musa and Ralph Fonseca had become closely linked by the time of the PUP’s 1989 to 1993 term of office. And Dickie Bradley, for his part, had become their acolyte.
When the PUP returned to power in August of 1998, the Espat family of Albert Street had become a high profile force in the PUP under Prime Minister/PUP Leader Musa, who had replaced Rt. Hon. George Price in a PUP national convention in 1996. Jorge, the Freetown area representative, was PUP chairman and Minister of National Security. His younger brother, Carlos, was the secretary-general of the PUP, and the youngest Espat brother, Mark, was Albert area representative and Minister of Tourism.
Dickie Bradley, who had been defeated in his Queen’s Square challenge to the UDP’s Dean Barrow in the 1998 elections, was, nevertheless, given the then wealthy Ministry of Housing by Musa and Fonseca. Cordel Hyde’s Lake I committee members had been arguing that, having defeated the UDP Minister of Housing, Hubert Elrington, in those August 1998 elections, Cordel should have become the Minister of Housing. Dickie Bradley, though, was closer to Said and Ralph, who considered Bradley more important and more loyal to them than Cordel. The PUP had committed large sums of money ($100 million from Taiwan) to an enormous housing program, and Dickie was the man for Ralph and Said.
It is difficult to pinpoint what was the real problem between Dickie Bradley and Jorge Espat, except that Dickie was pushing a human rights agenda and Jorge was the Minister for the police and the army, the two organizations which are most vulnerable to charges of human rights violations. This newspaper ended up being drawn into the Bradley vs Espat dispute, and we took Bradley’s side, because of the many years of friendship between himself and Kremandala.
In retrospect, we have to believe that Musa/Fonseca had issues with Jorge going back to early 1993. Elected to the Freetown seat in a January 1993 bye-election, Jorge, a trained economist, just two months later attacked PUP government corruption in a speech at a police passing-out parade. At that specific point in time, the unelected Ralph Fonseca, appointed to the Senate in September of 1989, was handling all of Belize’s public funds. Constitutionally, Prime Minister George Price was Minister of Finance, but it was Ralph who was doing the job. In that famous “bloated contracts” speech, then, Jorge was, in effect, attacking Ralph, and Said was Ralph’s partner.
No one has been able to explain exactly and adequately why the PUP called general elections in May of 1993, two months after Jorge’s “bloated contracts” speech. This was an incredible FIFTEEN MONTHS before those elections were due. There was one person who was not in the House, and who needed to enter the House to legitimize his activities. That person was Ralph Fonseca. You fill in the blanks.
In any case, having lost in June of 1993, the PUP leadership, to repeat, reached out to Kremandala, which was in a personal vendetta with new UDP Prime Minister, Manuel Esquivel. (This was a problem which had begun in 1988 with an attempt by Rufus X to contest the UDP’s Belize Rural North convention.)
By 2001, when overall euphoria still existed in PUP circles, Jorge Espat had again attacked PUP government corruption, whereupon, under duress, he resigned his Cabinet seat and the PUP chairmanship.
In the March 2003 general elections, Dickie Bradley again lost to Dean Barrow in Queen’s Square, whereupon he was sent to the Senate to run PUP government business there. The Housing money was exhausted, much of it wasted. It was then that Mr. Musa sent Cordel Hyde, the previous Minister of Education, to Housing. It was an obvious demotion, and perhaps even a slap in the face.
The April 2004 marriage of Eva Hyde, Cordel’s youngest sister, to Mark Espat was widely viewed at the time as a political marriage. Whatever the case, Dickie Bradley was now history, and Cordel Hyde and Mark Espat, two of only six PUP area representatives elected in the February 2008 general elections, have been leaders since late 2004 of a section of the PUP which seeks a return to the party’s social justice roots. As PUP deputy leaders emphasizing the needs of the Belizean people as opposed to the big money special interests, Mark and Cordel have become thorns in the political sides of Said and Ralph.
Less than a month before a historic PUP national convention, there is a power struggle presently going on inside the PUP, and that power struggle is the PUP’s business. It is only this newspaper’s business insofar as the importance of a strong and relevant Opposition to Belize’s parliamentary democracy is concerned. What the PUP wants to do is the PUP’s business. All we have said is that we cannot support a return to the excessive neoliberalism of the 1998 to 2004 era. If that means in real terms that we support Mark and Cordel, perhaps it is best said in the words of the streets – “blood thicka dan wata.”
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.