I haven’t had anything to say about the recent mass naturalizations of immigrants, apparently mostly Guatemalans, in time for voter registration and participation in this year’s elections. By now I think that we, the people of Belize, realize that there are powerful forces around us who have their own vision for Belize, and we sense that politicians here cannot achieve power without receiving “security clearance,” so to speak, from these powerful forces.
In 1995 a filmmaker named Andreas Hoessli made a documentary film, Devils Don’t Dream, about the Jacobo Arbenz presidency in Guatemala, which lasted from 1950 to 1954, and the CIA-sponsored invasion which ran him out of town. Two days before that invasion, the British hero of World War II, the legendary Winston Churchill, was meeting with then United States vice-president, Richard M. Nixon, in Washington on June 25, 1954. When a frantic Arbenz sought to involve the Security Council of the United Nations in the defence of his sovereign country against an illegal invasion financed and organized from abroad, everybody turned a deaf ear to his pleas. The Americans had gotten the British to consent to Arbenz’s overthrow, you see, and when the Americans and the British agree to anything, that’s like signed, sealed, and delivered. (Incidentally, Devils Don’t Dream won the Peace Film Prize at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival and First Prize at the 1996 Valladolid International Documentary Film Festival in Spain.)
When Right Honorable George C. Price, Hon. V. H. Courtenay, and the Hon. Assad Shoman signed the Heads of Agreement in London in March of 1981, this was a package that the Ronald Reagan administration in the United States and the Margaret Thatcher government of Great Britain had put together. Price, Courtenay, and Shoman had their backs protected by Washington and London. What better than that can you ask for?
When I was 17 years old, and badly mis-educated where regional and world history and realities were concerned, the State Department of the United States gave me a scholarship to attend a prestigious university in America. I was, naturally, proud of my scholarship, and can remember the many times and occasions when I explained to inquiring Americans that their State Department had given me a scholarship.
It took me a long time to realize that the State Department was spending their money on me in order to obtain a specific result. For many years, it appeared that the Americans had gotten a result diametrically opposed to that which they had intended in my case. The thing is, for whatever it’s worth, that I never became a communist and I have remained immersed in American sports and music culture. In other words, I was never the ideological revolutionary I may have appeared to be. Yet, by Belize’s conservative standards, I was controversial, some will say radical.
In 1951 the young People’s United Party official, Philip Goldson, visited Guatemala City and famously referred to his time there as “seven days of freedom.” In 1951, Arbenz was president of Guatemala. The Arbenz era was a unique and special time in the republic, and Jacobo paid for his attempt to assist the oppressed, indigenous masses of Guatemalans by being driven out of office and into a bitter, nomadic exile which ended with his premature death in Mexico City. He was just 57 when he died, quite mysteriously. His death was never investigated. His remains were taken to El Salvador, his wife’s native land, for burial.
The irony of the PUP attacks upon the UDP’s mass naturalizations is patent to those Belizeans of my generation. After Mr. Price became PUP Leader, it was he and the PUP who were accused of trying to “Latinize” the colony. And it was under the PUP in the late 1970’s, with the financial and unconditional support of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), that thousands of Central American refugees were welcomed into Belize and given large pieces of land, altering the ethnic composition of Belize forever.
I suppose the reason Afro-Belizeans did not kick up that much of a fuss when Belize’s ethnic composition was changed, was because our own people were migrating to the United States and becoming Americans, almost “hand over fist.”
The strange decision in 1964 to change Belize’s school holidays from April and May to July and August, can be understood now for what it was – it was a prescription mixed in Washington and sent down to self-governing British Honduras, in line with Washington’s post-Hattie decision in 1961 to fly Belizean families with relatives in the States to the relevant American cities. What the change in school holidays has meant is that, instead of Belizean children learning to swim and fish and hunt in April and May at the cays and in the countryside of Belize, they fly to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles in July and August to become “acclimatized” to American vibes. Where we were British Honduras then, today we are United States Belize.
It would have taken a superhuman effort, I guess, for us to take control of our own destiny in the settlement of Belize. America just looked too fine back there in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In a way, it’s the same thing going on with Central America immigrants here. Belize looks like a really good thing to them, and they are busting tail to try to make a living here. This is how Washington, London and the oil companies have designed it. Get those troublesome blacks out, and bring in refugees who are not sure of their rights. Destabilize the population, and let’s pump some oil. Not just any oil – light, sweet Belizean crude. The game is bigger than big.