During the last Maya land rights case, experts testified that it is extremely difficult to make a living in Toledo District if you are limited to 50 acres, and how Maya practices are well adapted to the environment.
Seven attractive women will take to the stage of the Bliss Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday, February 28, for a night of glamour and entertainment.
I started playing music for public consumption in November of 1989 in the equipment-challenged studio of KREM FM. Most people’s home stereo sets had better electronics than the fourth or maybe fifth-hand hodgepodge of relics that sat on the formica-covered desk in that studio. One turntable from an electronic jumble sale—$125, two tape decks from the now defunct Maya Electronics—$350 apiece, playing music to Belize on the nation’s first private radio station—priceless.
He came, he collected, he departed. No one saw the man…well, Amandala’s Aaron Humes reported that he met him …once. Pray, how does Mr. Aaron know that the Ministry of Security didn’t shake him off the scent, pass off some Jamaican tourist as the expensive whiz kid come to save us from crime? It is my gut feeling that our Mr. Crooks is a phantom. My junior sleuth nose has noticed that his first name (Harold), and his last name (Crooks), match up letter for letter with…Carlos…as in Minister Carlos. Ha, his entire name matches up letter for letter…with Gerald Westby. That GW spells the Commissioner of Police, Braa! Now, if I were only smart enough to figure out the “code.”
I see where the editor of the Reporter was tripping all over her or himself trying to justify PM Barrow’s huge slap in our face, choosing the USA over Belize for his wedding.
As an assistant coach in the nineties to one of Belize’s most successful sporting franchises, the Raiders, I received one of my most important foundation lessons from my father, who was the owner of the team. My father’s message was simple: “We prepare with local ingredients, but we aspire for international achievements”. Although for the most part we were chiseled out of our opportunities on the regional and international scene, making sure our efforts were geared toward building what could be measured by global standards rewarded us with local success. Unfortunately, as a nation, our preparations in most disciplines have not had such lofty aspirations. Over the past twenty years or so we have been mired in straight-out mediocrity, if not a tragic spiral of deterioration. To make it worse, not only have we not set our expectations high, but we have also penalized those who have; and are very often guilty of not recognizing their great works. The true measure of achievement cannot be quantified by local dimensions; we live in an ultra-competitive world, where talent and potential need to be matched equally by our tenacity and efficiency, and a regard for international excellence.
I was flicking channels the other morning when my eyes landed on the face of present Minister of Education, H. Patrick Faber, sitting in among the early morning Wave TV crew. I hadn’t heard a peep from this gentleman since he got egg all over his mug for “interfering” in UDP Belmopan City Council business last year, so I thought, well, what’s he got to say for himself now? A mouthful!
For many weeks now Belizeans have been faced with the episode at Jalacte wherein a Guatemalan “gentleman” by the name of Leonel Arellanos has held his government and its military and our government and its military at bay by refusing to remove (or allow to be moved peacefully) his illegally constructed and placed structure on our national territory.
In the Sunday, Feb 1 issue of the Amandala (#2305), Brother Ismael Omar Shabazz (Imam) gave his opinion (My ICJ opinions) on the Belize/Guatemala matter at the ICJ.
On Sunday, March 16, 2008, an article was published in the Amandala entitled “Cane Farmers suffering because of waiting-in-line system.” The following is a reproduction of a conversation I had with Mr. Felipe Tzul. “The Tower Hill Sugar Factory only has the capacity to receive six thousand tons of cane per day since 1968. Cane Farmers complain that after burning, cutting and loading the truck with the product, the Sugar Factory should receive it within 36 hours. But most of the time they, the Cane Farmers, have to stay outside in a line with their trucks for a very long time. On many of these occasions they have to sleep out there under their trucks. It is not an easy task. Mr. Felipe Tzul was explaining to me that after the cane is burnt (in the fields) and it is not received at the factory before 72 hours, the sugar cane decreases in quality, and it loses its value. This old practice doesn’t benefit the cane farmers anymore, because they lose financially. The cost of operation is very high, so much so that for this 2008, fertilizers went up from $64.50 to $93.25 for a 100-pound sack. If the sugar company would receive the farmers’ product in time, it would return more economic benefits for the cane farmers. Mr. Felipe Tzul suggests that the season for receiving sugar cane should be from January to May, because, he claims the TC/TS (Tons of cane for tons of sugar) is in its precise moment to harvest and deliver. Probably our Belizean sugar company should look at this system, which is the practice in the Spanish-speaking Central American countries, where factories have the capacity of receiving 13,000 tons of sugar cane per day. There is no waiting-in-line system. The directors of the Belize Sugar Cane Association should give their utmost preoccupation on the situation cane farmers are going through, concluded Mr. Tzul.”
Some say the PM should have gone to Orange Walk Town to meet with the farmers on Monday. He couldn’t. Some say the farmers should not have blocked the road. They had to. It was an impossible situation on Monday. Tragically, it ended up in a brother losing his life, and serious injuries to others. BSI and the BCFA are naturally antagonistic. The SICB (Sugar Industry Control Board), the organization between BSI and the cane farmers, has to explain to the nation how we arrived at an impossible situation.
We expected that PM Musa would have had a soft heart for the masses, because he had expressed and showed socialist inclinations in his life before ascending to the highest place on the Hill in Belmopan. We were right. Mr. Musa did have his heart in the right place, did love the common people. What we didn’t know was that he also had a soft spot for people who were rich, and people who were greedy, and people who were both rich and greedy.
Whatever the government, be it a monarchy, a dictatorship or a democracy, the hierarchy of the Church will support it; unless the government is against religious freedom or outrightly persecutes the Church, as it did in communist Russia.
“The pre-devaluation history of modern Belize is the history of the development and dominance of a Creole society. While other ethnic groups may have inhabited the land area of the country and figured in the census rolls, they were, in the words of Dr. Grant, ‘… in the colonial society but not of it.’ For all practical purposes, until the political awakening of December 1949 the local politics and economics of the colony were made and manipulated in the capital, and the capital was Creole and Elitist. The values and attitudes of the Creole “ARISTOCRATIC” families with whom the Colonial Government shared power were the forces which dictated not only the Colony’s Constitutional and economic progress, but also the Colony’s vision of its own history. That vision, understandably, was one which equated the history of the Colony with the history of the development of the Creole majority and particularly with the history of the privileged class within that group. It was a society which venerated the European genes in its composition.”
