“Nora Parham, the first woman ever executed by the state in Belize, was hanged on 5 June 1963, in a rare display of the hybrid colonial/neocolonial state’s capacity for sovereign violence. The jury, entirely male, as were all juries until 1970, had wrestled with the evidence for four hours before handing down both a guilty verdict and a mercy plea, evidently in an effort to balance the state’s demand for justice and the public’s strong sympathy for Parham. Mercy was denied by the Executive Council – led by the British governor but stacked with PUP legislators – three days before the execution. A clemency petition from Parham’s relatives the day before her death swayed neither the governor nor First Minister George Price. The PUP’s paper, the Belize Times, had already made the ruling party’s position clear in an editorial denouncing National Independence Party (NIP) accusations that the PUP was taking partisan revenge by letting Parham die. The authority of the state, it argued, not party interests, required such harsh punishment: “If sympathy can change court rulings, then the respect and authority of the courts would start on its slow flow to nil; the prestige would be lost. And we would be entering into nationhood without the advantage of our one stable institution: the court.”
– pg. 241, Anne S Macpherson in FROM COLONY TO NATION: WOMEN ACTIVISTS AND THE GENDERING OF POLITICS IN BELIZE, 1912 – 1982, University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
In Belize today, the vast majority of citizens are living in a kind of fear. We are intimidated by the thought that we can be murdered, by the employees of the drug traffickers or the agents of the state, and not that much will be done about it.
One of the reasons not that much will be done about it, is because Belize has reached the point where witnesses to capital crimes refuse to testify, because they are afraid for their lives. This is a very serious state of affairs. Before we arrived at this point, we had seen where judges, jurors and police officers were being corrupted by massive bribes. So that, the deterioration, unraveling even, of the justice system, did not begin at the bottom of the social pyramid. It began at the top, and yes, it involved politicians elected to high office who had taken public oaths on Holy Bibles.
The clear majority of Belizeans believe that one answer to the emergency of lawlessness in our society is to execute someone as an example to the rest. But the political leaders of Belize have found that their freedom to act is restrained by the Privy Council in Great Britain and by various donor agencies in Europe. The Privy Council routinely grants reprieves to condemned Belizean murderers, and the European donor agencies threaten to cut off aid to Belize (and other poor countries) if we execute condemned murderers. The Europeans say capital punishment is inhumane.
The fact of the matter is that the British and the Europeans executed many of their citizens while they were building their nation states. They even executed their own monarchs. The English beheaded Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587, and they beheaded Charles I in 1649. The French guillotined Louis XVI in 1793, and added his wife, Marie Antoinette, to the list for good measure. England, France and Germany are each about a thousand years old. For most of those years, they were executing hundreds of their citizens every year.
But now that they rule the world, the British and Europeans have found religion, so to speak, and they no longer want to kill. And they are insisting that we poor nation states also desist from killing, even while our citizens are being murdered in what sometimes appears to be an orgy of violence.
Success in Britain and Europe has meant that they can take care of all their citizens. There are European countries like Sweden and the Netherlands where there are no poor people. Overall, there are no people starving in Europe, and so these societies do not produce a large number of desperate, homicidal criminals. I’m not saying that only poverty and starvation produce murderers. I am saying that as we poor countries, or countries with poor people, like Belize, experience greater social suffering because of rising oil and food prices, we will have to deal with even more crime and violence.
As a people, Belizeans achieved political independence in 1981. The then ruling politicians explained to us, ad nauseam, that with this independence, Belize would experience more development. If you walk or drive around the old capital today, you will see fabulous buildings. The high rise (by Belize City standards) constructions are mostly owned by Indian, Chinese, Taiwanese, Arab and other immigrant families. Belize experienced “more development” as the country was opened up to both unskilled migrant labour from Central America and sophisticated entrepreneurial talent from Asia and the Middle East. (Predictably, Americans have also flooded Belize, but they are not evident in the old capital. They prefer the cayes, beachfront properties, and the countryside.)
The masses of roots Belizean people have not experienced real and sustainable development. The reasons for this are many, but the results are staring us right in the face – a frightening increase in crime and violence.
Crime and violence are not, or should not be, an issue for party political propaganda. Traditionally, all roots Belizean people knew to do when dealing with disrespectful or delinquent young, was to discipline them. The ability to discipline our young has been taken out of our hands, and that has been done, to a great extent, by the same rich European nations who buy our primary products for low prices, and sell us their industrial grade products for high ones. They keep us poor, and at the same time tell us that we cannot discipline our own young or they will cut off the handouts we are receiving.
It is obvious that our independence has been compromised. We can’t do what we want to do even in as fundamental an area as crime and violence. Belizean lawbreakers appear to be more powerful than law-abiding Belizeans. To repeat, in Belize today, the vast majority of citizens are living in a kind of fear.
And yet, 45 years ago, The Belize Times of June 3, 1963 insisted that Nora Parham should hang because “sympathy” should not “change court rulings.” This was the voice of the ruling party. A victim of domestic violence, Nora Parham was hanged on the Belize City Prison’s gallows two days later.
Crime and violence were not a factor in daily life in British Honduras in 1963. But we insisted on hanging Nora Parham. In 2008, we can’t insist on hanging anybody, even though law and order have broken down. So what went wrong over the last 45 years, and shouldn’t that be a conversation for all our postgraduate academics and highly trained scholars? Why not?