Belize is in a critical time where our economy and finances are concerned, and this newspaper over the years has taken advantage of Bill Lindo’s formidable knowledge supply and data base in these areas in order to inform and educate our readers. From time to time, however, we have to insert editorial disclaimers at the bottom of Mr. Lindo’s material, and this specific editorial is intended to explain why this is so.
Bill Lindo was an original panelist on the Kremandala Show, which began on KREM Radio in 1994. About five years ago, the Kremandala Show began to be simulcast on KREM Television, which markedly increased the show’s popularity and impact. We do not have a problem with Mr. Lindo’s broadcast and telecast opinions on the Kremandala Show, because electronic pronouncements are like the wind. They blow away. In print, however, opinions last a long time, sometimes centuries. At this newspaper, we have a great respect for the printed word.
Bill Lindo joined the People’s United Party (PUP) in 1973. He had returned to Belize from Brooklyn in 1971, and he became an officer of the UBAD Party in 1972. When UBAD quarreled and divided in 1973, Bill Lindo moved to the ruling PUP, where he quickly found a home.
Over the years, Bill Lindo became a PUP insider. He became a confidant of the most powerful men in the party, including former Leader George Price, the late former Deputy Leader C.L.B. Rogers, former Deputy Leader Florencio Marin, former Chairman Louis Sylvestre, and the former National Campaign Manager Ralph Fonseca.
At the specific time Bill Lindo joined the PUP in 1973, his uncle, Dean R. Lindo, was becoming the most powerful man in the political group which would become the United Democratic Party (UDP) in September of 1973. The general election held in October of 1974 established Dean Lindo’s UDP as the most powerful domestic electoral threat the PUP had ever faced, and after the UDP blew out the PUP in the December 1977 Belize City Council elections, it was widely believed that the UDP would take national power in 1979.
Whether his family relationship to the PUP’s most formidable enemy negatively affected his career in the PUP, we cannot say, but Bill Lindo never became a PUP general election candidate. He was defeated by Rafael Chavez when he tried to become the Albert candidate in 1984, and he was beaten by Mark Espat when he sought to become the Albert standard bearer in 1996. As a PUP insider over the years, however, Bill Lindo received many political favors, especially grants of prime lands, various government contracts, and so on.
A little biographical information is necessary here. Bill Lindo was born to wealth. His maternal grandfather, Alden “Swapy” Tillett, was one of the richest natives (so-called Creoles) in British Honduras. Mr. Tillett made his fortune as a waterfront kingpin during the colonial days. He was so big that, while the Roes now behave like royalty, their late patriarch, Gordon Roe, was in fact a BEC employee who was financed in the insurance business by the said Alden “Swapy” Tillett. Mr. Tillett died a couple years after Bill joined the PUP, and Bill Lindo was his estate’s executor. Although he briefly experimented with radical politics during his college days in New York City, Bill Lindo, to put it bluntly, has not known a hungry day in his life.
Bill Lindo used the Kremandala Show to defend the neoliberal policies of the Musa/Fonseca administration, most notably after the Social Security Board scandal in late July of 2004. His exchanges on the show with then UDP panelist, Ambrose Tillett, were fierce and furious. Even though Mr. Lindo claimed that he totally believed in manufacturing as the key to a strong Belizean economy, and though he argued that he personally was at odds with Musa/Fonseca policy, when push came to shove he defended everything the PUP government was doing and everybody in it.
More than that, even though Bill had been a self-proclaimed ally of Lake Independence’s Cordel Hyde and Caribbean Shores’ Joe Coye, both charter members of the G-7 Cabinet group which challenged Musa/ Fonseca on Thursday, August 12, 2004, by the Monday morning of August 16, 2004, when violent rhetoric began to come out of the PUP’s Northern Caucus, taken over by Florencio Marin in support of Musa, Fonseca, and Price, Bill Lindo was 100 percent Marin, Musa, Fonseca and Price.
Mr. Lindo has been arguing, passionately, that the global warming/climate change lobby is actually a neo-Malthusian plot engineered by the British monarchy to eliminate billions of poor people from planet earth. Lindo receives his information and guidance from the Washington-based Lyndon LaRouche group, of which he has been a disciple for decades. To be fair, LaRouche and Lindo can rightfully claim credit for predicting the international financial collapse of 2007 which followed the bursting of the housing/derivatives bubble. Where the extreme LaRouche/Lindo views on global warming/climate change are concerned, however, we are really not sure. In fact, we are not at all convinced. We see the brutal hand of Big Oil in the attacks on the global warming/climate change lobby. That same Big Oil is becoming more and more muscular in Belize. Look at Cayo; consider Orange Walk; be careful in Toledo.
The main thing is this: knowledge without commitment is like form without function. Bill Lindo has all these ideas, but what we know of him in the last 36 years is this: whenever the s— hits the fan, he runs for cover to the PUP big boys. His argument is, “I have to live in Belize.” What it is, is that he is no Robeson, Mandela or Rodney. He loves a good argument, but when it’s time to march, he appears to remember all the comforts of his youth. And then, he takes cover. Those who are kind, call this “party loyalty.” Those are their views, and not those of this newspaper.