Maximum respect should be given to the Belize policemen at the Burrell Boom checkpoint who were responsible for detaining the four Mexican policemen, attired as civilians, who were in possession of an unlicensed gun and ammunition on Monday, October 13.

With the neoliberal capitalism which has ruled the planet for the last two decades imploding all over the globalized world, it is for sure that nation states will now be moving to more regulated financial and economic systems. That “regulation” can only come from the governments of those nation states, which means that the world will be moving towards various versions of that socialism which the neoliberals have demonized, made into a dreaded concept during the Friedmanite era.

In the first place, four years ago political observers had noted the huge difference between the February 2004 UDP demonstration against the PUP central government, and the August 2004 demonstration against that same PUP government, a demonstration which was organized by the UDP but featured support from the various trade unions of Belize. (Both the demonstrations were held in the nation’s population center – Belize City.) The August 2004 demonstration was much, much larger than the February 2004 turnout had been.

The PUP at birth, 58 years ago, was an urban workers’ party. The party soon won the support of the small farmers and rural workers, and the support from the countryside became the bulwark of the PUP from the 1960’s onwards. But, the fact remains, the PUP was born in Belize (City), then the capital of the colony called British Honduras. Some of the audacity of the early PUP came from the energy of urban workers who had returned home from working on the Panama Canal.

Former UDP Prime Minister Manuel Esquivel’s decision last week to come public and endorse Anthony Michael for the UDP’s mayoral convention this Sunday, October 5, while at the same time implicitly condemning the mayoral incumbent, Zenaida Moya, is a remarkable decision which requires analysis.

We have said it to you before, perhaps not in so many words. It is possible for a nincompoop to ride the electoral tracks of one of the major political parties all the way to the Cabinet. For political success in Belize, unwavering loyalty to the political party is the sine qua non, not brains or ability or talent. An idiot can become a Cabinet Minister. If he is not only a party loyalist, but also a disciple in one of the major churches here, why, a jackass can join Cabinet. This is just the way it is.

Beginning with Chile in 1973, the United States forced all the economies of the Western Hemisphere, with the notable exception of Cuba, to go neoliberal. Neoliberalism was the model of so-called development which had been built by Milton Friedman and his economist colleagues at the University of Chicago. Neoliberalism involved the throwing open of national markets to international finance and ownership, privatization of public utilities, curtailment of government spending, slashing of state bureaucracies, crushing of militant labor unions, and the abandonment of state subsidies for education, health care, housing, and food.

In a recent report prognosticating Latin America’s future, the National Intelligence Council, an advisory group to the CIA, NSC, and Pentagon made up of military and academic national security experts, fretted that indigenous movements, such as those found in Bolivia protesting corporate control of gas reserves, could “evolve into more radical expressions,” converging “with some non-indigenous but radicalized movements – such as the Brazilian ‘landless,’ the Paraguayan and Ecuadorian peasants, and the Argentine ‘picketers.’” “In this scenario,” the report went on, “by 2020 the groups will have grown exponentially and obtained the majority adherence of indigenous peoples in their countries, and a ‘demonstration’ or ‘contagion’ effect could cause spillover into other nations. The resulting indigenous irredentism would include rejection of western political and economic order maintained by Latin Americans of European origin, causing a deep social fracture that could lead to armed insurgency, repressive response by counter-insurgent governments, social violence and even political and territorial balkanization.” - pgs. 213, 214, EMPIRE’S WORKSHOP, by Greg Grandin, Owl Books, New York, 2006.

Belize is a country which each year spends more and more of its national budget on education, but watches the situation at the base of our sociological pyramid simultaneously becoming worse and worse. Every August and September, when the new school year opens with great promise for a certain section of the society, thousands of our children have their educations abruptly ended, and they are thrown into the streets. The mill of crime begins to grind them to pieces.

In last weekend’s issue of Amandala, we reminded you of what the Guatemalan Army Chief of Staff, Rene Mendoza Palomo, said of us Belizeans in 1982: “At the very least, the blacks will have to be deported. Quite simply, we would send them back to the land of their ancestors.” At the time Mendoza Palomo made that statement, black people were still the majority in Belize. Today in Belize, blacks are a decided minority, of which a substantial percentage have become drug dealers, muggers, armed robbers and beggars.

When Guatemalan farmers, xateros and loggers start firing on Belizean soldiers on the Belizean side of the border, it is reasonable to conclude that if these Guatemalans are not in the direct employ of the oligarchy/military which rules Guatemala, then that oligarchy/military supports the armed incursions, and the farmers, xateros and loggers know that.

39 years ago, the ruling PUP leased a lot of swamp land on Partridge Street to the United Black Association for Development. In those days, Partridge Street was on the western outskirts of the capital city, and it was practically a picado trail.

It was an important aspect of the enslavement process in Africa, primarily West Africa, for the personal and institutional memories of the new African slaves to be destroyed by the Europeans. By the time those Africans, chained in the bottoms of slave ships, who survived the horror of the trip across the Atlantic, reached the so-called New World, they were beginning to lose consciousness of their families, their languages, their tribes, their skills, their religions, and their ancestral homes. Their very names were obliterated, and the process of psychic destruction began.

Juliet Thimbriel, the general manager of WAVE Radio and co-host of the radio station’s morning talk show, is a major on-air talent and an absolute loyalist of UDP Leader/Prime Minister Dean Barrow’s. But she made a big mistake on Wednesday morning when Belize City Mayor, Zenaida Moya, called the WAVE morning show immediately after the city administrator, Englebert Perera, had given his side of a story on the UDP radio station. In fact, Juliet made more than one mistake.