There are many, many extraordinary stories of cruelty, greed, barbarism, megalomania and heroism in the history of Latin American politics. One such story is the historical novel entitled THE FEAST OF THE GOAT, by the Peruvian Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa. You should read it.

The novel tells the story of the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, the absolute dictator of the Dominican Republic, in 1961. Trujillo had ruled his country, which adjoins Haiti to the east on the island of Hispaniola, for decades. He preached and practised anti-communism, and for this reason was always supported by the State Department of Washington, despite his domestic excesses and crimes.

After Trujillo’s assassination, there was a period of instability in the Dominican Republic, and the U.S. government sent in Rangers in 1965. Among these Rangers was one Charles Good, who was in the army of the republic of Honduras. He saw active action in Santo Domingo, then, before he migrated to British Honduras, where he became a prominent member of the new Special Forces, known in the streets of Belize as “the paramilitary.”

The paramilitary, under the leadership of the late Fred Gill, was formed by the People’s United Party (PUP) government in 1968 after the street uprisings in Belize City earlier that year in protest against the Seventeen (Webster) Proposals.

A senior football team, called the “Invaders,” was soon formed, and the face of that basically paramilitary team was Charlie Good, who was the goalkeeper. He was also the face of the paramilitary itself, as a public institution, because of his classic physique and flamboyant personality. It was said in the streets that he kept a bayonet in the back of his goal during football games in case anyone became too aggressive.

Good also boxed professionally in Belize, his most famous bout being against Edward “Thor” Middleton at Bird’s Isle. Middleton, himself a man of incredible physique, had been a paramilitary soldier under Good’s command, and it was said that he had a personal rivalry with Charlie: Thor, a native of Ontario village, wanted to prove something to Good. It was a brutal fight. Thor floored Charlie, but Good ended up winning.

In any case, Charlie Good’s career in the paramilitary was practically spectacular, and then in 1978 the Belize Defence Force (BDF) was formed, with the paramilitary as the core of the new Belize army. The Belize Volunteer Guard (BVG) was incorporated into the BDF.

When Charlie Good came to see me on First Street, and we will say in 1982, for argument’s sake, because it had to be after Belize’s independence in 1981, I explained to you in last week’s newspaper that he was agitated because Tom Greenwood of the Volunteer Guard was being jumped over him for first Belizean command of the BDF.

So now, how was it that this same Charles Good had reached the stage in late 1984 where he was being offered a contract by Maxwell Samuels, then the Commissioner of Police, to “murder or maim” Evan X Hyde? No member of the Belizean media has ever touched this story, and Sir Manuel Esquivel, when he became Prime Minister just weeks afterwards, refused to investigate the incident.

Well, to a certain extent Good’s life had fallen apart between 1982 and 1984, because his common-law wife, Olive, mother of four of his children, was harassing him in Magistrate’s Court for maintenance, and she was receiving highly favorable judgments from the Magistrate, a Guyanese by the name of Yakub Gaznabbi. Over a period of time, under the crushing weight of these judgments, the great Charlie Good had become financially desperate.

Before I proceed, let me say that the reason this story has to be told, almost four decades afterwards, is because a man named Rufus X risked his life in 1984 in order to save mine. This same Rufus X, a foundation member and loyalist of the United Democratic Party (UDP) in 1973, in 1987 was denied the right by the Sir Manuel-led UDP to contest the leadership of the UDP’s Belize Rural North constituency, then represented by Sam Rhaburn, who had been one of Net Vasquez’s accounting employees.

I first met Maxwell Samuels in 1970 after the late Ismail Shabazz and I had been acquitted one July night of seditious conspiracy in the Supreme Court. Samuels was the police photographer that night, and he later did me the favor of giving me a couple of the photos he had taken of the jubilant crowd which swarmed the court, and grabbed and hoisted Shabazz and myself and the successful defence attorneys — Assad Shoman and Said Musa.
I guess during the 1970s, Samuels had risen through the ranks of the Belize Police Force. And when Ronald Reagan’s United States government began running cocaine operations through Belize in the early 1980s in order to raise funding to support the so-called contras in their civil war against the Sandinista government which had come to power in Nicaragua in 1979, Samuels was Commissioner of Police in Belize.

The longtime PUP Minister of Police, Hon. C. L. B. Rogers, had been replaced as Home Affairs Minister in January of 1984. His replacement, Hon. V. H. Courtenay, fell ill around April of that year, so the question of who was Samuels’ Minister in late October/early November of 1984, when he gave Good the Evan X assignment, is a most intriguing one.

At the September National Day celebrations in 1984, such had been the family and financial pressure (to which we previously referred) on Charlie Good that he collapsed in the sun. For such a macho man, this was a huge humiliation, and only this newspaper reported the story.

Perhaps the powers-that-be felt that such a story in this newspaper would infuriate Good to the point where he could be contracted for a hit. In these types of situations, the hitman himself is often eliminated afterwards in order to prevent any evidence from being provided by him.

I suppose I will have to continue this story in another column. Charles Good took out his pistol in the Magistrate’s Court one morning and fired at Magistrate Gaznabbi and his common-law, Olive. I think Olive was hit in the hip. Dr. Leroy Taegar always insisted that Good could not have intended to kill any of them, because he was a trained marksman.

In any case, Good then left the Magistrate’s Court in the old Paslow Building and came to this newspaper’s office looking for me. My printer, Noel Ferguson, called me at home and said Good had a gun and had blood on him. It was after 11:00 that morning.

In the Radio Belize 12:30 p.m. news that day, they reported that Charles Good was still at large, and that’s when I went looking for help. (A week or two before, I had been indirectly warned at Mike’s Club by a friend named Arthur “Tureto” Neal.) I went to Rufus X.

Charlie Good was sentenced to twelve years in Her Majesty’s Prison for the Magistrate’s Court shootings. The then Governor-General, Dame Minita Gordon, reduced the sentence to two years. Charlie opened a business in Cayo after the prison time, but life became harder and harder as time went by, and no one up top was looking out for him. At some point, he began talking to Rufus X, and then he began talking to me. (To be continued.)

NOTE: Charles Good, Maxwell Samuels, C. L. B. Rogers, V. H. Courtenay, Dame Minita Gordon, Dr. Leroy Taegar, and Noel Ferguson are all deceased.