Former three-time UDP government minister, John Saldivar, has repeatedly told Belizeans about all the wonderful things he was able to do with funds he received from Lev Dermen, a crook whose present residence is a US jail. Mr. Saldivar isn’t the first Belizean to receive funds from suspect persons/sources, but he is the one who got burned the worst. Mr. Saldivar won a convention to lead the UDP, and three days later he was forced to step down after his association with the unsavory Dermen was revealed. PM Barrow made it appear that it was his sole decision that Mr. Saldivar’s suspect association was too damning for him to hold such a high position, but undercurrents suggest there was considerable pressure from a powerful foreign country.
It is rare, almost unheard of, for someone to give out substantial sums of money with no strings attached. It was revealed that Mr. Dermen, a naturalized American with business ties to Turkey, wanted to be an honorary consul to Belize. His ambition reportedly was frowned on by the US government, but his friends, particularly Saldivar, didn’t give up their support for him readily. The fraudster reportedly had discussions with a number of other UDP ministers, in his quest to be a voluntary diplomat.
It isn’t known why Dermen was so determined to be appointed as an honorary consul to Belize. OCCRP, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, says that by convention (the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (1963)) honorary consuls do not have diplomatic immunity, nor are their family members or employees covered by immunity provisions. The honorary consul post aside, Dermen must have felt he was making a great investment. In 2020, Saldivar was a leading candidate in a convention to decide who would lead the UDP into the next general election, and if fortune smiled on his candidacies, Mr. Dermen, to put it politely, would have had a direct line to the Prime Minister of Belize.
Another unwholesome person who apparently had a business connection with our political leaders was Won Hong Kim, a South Korean. Somehow, Mr. Kim, who was in a jail in Taiwan and could show no records of ever visiting Belize, was issued a Belize passport. Minister of State at the time, Elvin Penner reportedly signed immigration documents for Mr. Kim, for which deeds he was subsequently removed from office. We don’t know Mr. Penner’s interest; maybe he was a Good Samaritan. We know what Mr. Kim’s interest was. Media reports say he was trying to avoid being extradited to South Korea, where he was wanted for embezzling huge sums of money from a shipping company.
Belizeans are not naïve. They have watched local leaders engage with crooks, and with rapacious local and foreign entities that get extraordinary favors from our governments. They have literally watched local leaders grow fat in office, while the poverty rate in our country increases year after year. Belizeans know that if we will get our governments to serve the people better, we have to control the people who sponsor the political parties. As Marco A. Lopez wrote last week in the Amandala, in his article titled, “Fiesta o Partido?“, “Our so-called political parties, while they give lip-service to the importance of checking the monster of campaign financing and baggage that comes along with it, make no true attempts to implement the necessary changes, to protect themselves from predators, and more importantly the assets and interests of the Belizean people.”
The people’s cry for our political system to be protected hasn’t been successful, but they keep fighting. A main platform of third parties such as the VIP and the BPP was that we establish campaign financing laws. The NTUCB took to the streets prior to the last general election, and primary among their demands was for politicians to disclose campaign contributions over $1,000, for limits to be placed on the amounts individuals and businesses could contribute to political parties, and for donors and their donations to be disclosed to the public during election season.
The people thought they had found a champion when the PUP, a party which has held office on a number of occasions but which had been turned away at the polls three consecutive times beginning in 2008, promised to address the problem. In its 2020-to-2025 manifesto, the PUP swore not only to make the Elections & Boundaries Commission more independent, fix election dates, and register political parties, but also to “introduce campaign finance reform with legislation to ensure disclosure of campaign contributions.” Speaking on his party’s promise to the people, then opposition leader, Hon. John Briceño, told Channel Five there was a need to define and set standards for political parties, and that we had to decide if we will have a private, a public, or a private-public model for campaign financing.
No matter the political system, the party that sits in government controls the purse of the country, and both saints and sinners will try to get their tentacles into the ones on top. It’s no stroll in the park to control campaign donations. Even the self-proclaimed world’s best democracy, the USA, has difficulty protecting their electoral system. Ms. Miriam Marks, in a discussion of timely disclosure of campaign financing in a 2016 article in Zócalo Public Square, a magazine of ideas from Arizona State University, exposed deep flaws in their system.
Marks said that by law, information on the financing of political campaigns must be divulged, but the identities of the largest donors to “super PACs [the main money-vehicle through which candidates receive donations] cannot be determined until months after the contributions were made.” Also, “social welfare groups that are not required to disclose their donors… exert their influence by funding candidates and super PACs in anonymity.”
It’s not an easy task to control campaign financing, but it cannot be that vermin and voracious feeders have such easy access to our leaders and so much influence on our electoral process. It is urgent that we devise and implement sensible campaign financing laws. It will take serious work, and if the PUP will deliver on its promise of campaign financing reform, it had better get on with the job.
The party has been in office a year and a half now, and not only has no bill been tabled, but the party hasn’t even engaged the people in a discussion. The PUP doesn’t mind tabling bills straight from the party’s think tank, and having us express our views afterward. This one they haven’t come close to touching.
Quite likely the PUP is under “manners” from the suspects who perennially fund their party. No doubt the party loves the status quo very much and would want to ride it some more. But Belizeans have had it with the rotten system. They demand a system that isn’t a wide open door to more Dermens.