When the COVID-19 virus broke out in March of 2020, almost two years ago, I remember thinking to myself that the only way our roots people could survive this catastrophe was if there were some transfer of wealth from Belize’s super rich to the poor. This did not occur. In fact, the super rich grabbed more.

As time went along, I asked my eldest son, Mose, how it was that our people were surviving. I knew that things had been rough even before the coronavirus, so the virus was a case of, as we say, from bad to worse. Mose said that it was the Belizean diaspora in the United States which had made survival in the home country possible. In the absence of any other explanation, I accepted his analysis.

When we watch our destitute and mentally challenged staggering along so pitifully along the streets of the old capital, those of us who know the history feel a dagger in our chest. These are our people, and there was a time, for centuries in fact, that our people, our enslaved people, were the backbone of this territory. Our enslaved people for centuries were the vast majority of the population in this British colony, which was called British Honduras by the colonial masters in London.

All Guatemalan children are taught in school that the land of Belize was stolen from Guatemala by the British, and that we Belizeans of color who live here were British chattel. That is a whole history in itself, and it will be culminating with a judgment by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

I have said to you before that we Belizeans were more fortunate than other British subjects in this Caribbean region, because we had a land bridge through Mexico to the United States of America, the richest economy in the world. British Honduras was the only British possession in Spanish-speaking Central America. So that, when American immigration officials at the border between the U.S. and Mexico heard black people speaking English, they assumed such individuals were black Americans, not “wetbacks.”

It was World War II which opened the eyes of the working class in B.H. to the wealth and largesse of America, as compared to the suffering being imposed on us by the “geechy” British. During World War II (1939-1945), Belizean workers were hired to work in the Canal Zone in Panama, where the Americans ran things. Belizeans began to long to travel to the United States.

The wider context of this situation had to do with the Monroe Doctrine, a declaration by the United States government in 1823 that they would no longer tolerate interference in the Western Hemisphere by any European power, a designation which would include Great Britain, which was in possession of British Honduras in 1823. (The United States of America had declared independence from Great Britain in 1776.)

But there was a special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. in the nineteenth century (white supremacy), so that in 1859 the United States “godfathered” a deal whereby Guatemala acceded to international boundaries to define The Jewel — 8,867 square miles — as British territory.

A few decades later, the ruling business/industrial and military classes in Guatemala began to complain about the 1859 Treaty, but in 1919 there was a massive uprising by the black people in Belize (the so-called “British blacks”) which was essentially rejecting British colonial rule. Still, Guatemala, the hostile 1,000- pound gorilla, remained on Belize’s western and southern borders, and it was the British who had to send a warship here in 1948 to protect Belizeans, the majority of whom were black.

By 1950, however, because the British devalued the Belizean dollar, Belizeans began to agitate for self-government and independence. This original Belizean thrust for self-rule was supported between 1951 and 1954 by a Guatemalan government led by Jacobo Arbenz.

But Arbenz was too nationalistic for the Americans, so Washington organized his overthrow and began installing CIA puppets like Carlos Castillo Armas and Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes to run Guatemala. The result was a terrible civil war in Guatemala, which began in 1960 and lasted until 1996.

During this period of bloody violence in the republic, Belize was completely peaceful, and achieved self-government in 1964. The British were now beginning to transfer British Honduras to the hegemony of the Americans who, following Hurricane Hattie in 1961, began to absorb Belize’s black population into the Union.

Today, Belize’s is a minority black population. The transfer from majority black to minority black was accomplished peacefully because we Belizeans wanted to go north.

So now, this is where Belize is today, where Washington decided for us to be. The only thing that really makes us different from the two Central American republics around us — Guatemala and Honduras — is that English is the official language in Belize. When that changes, this becomes a whole new ball game. Trust me.