All things being equal, the UDP should have won the 1979 general elections. All things being equal, the PUP should have won the 1993 general elections. But, all things are not equal. Stuff happens. We can’t control the present, but we should be careful to be accurate with the past.
Perhaps the most glaring historical error in Godfrey Smith’s recently released and authorized biography of the Rt. Hon. George C. Price was the linking of Evan X Hyde and Dean Lindo in the 1971 Belize City Council elections. Smith allowed himself to be the conduit for this mistake. He did not himself manufacture the mistake, but he bears the conduit responsibility.
Historically, the most important thing about the 1971 Belize City Council elections was precisely that Dean Lindo did not participate: he led his PDM in a boycott of the campaign run against the ruling PUP by a coalition of the NIP and the young UBAD Party. The NIP/UBAD coalition won 39 percent of the votes, and no doubt would have won more if Lindo’s PDM had joined them. (The PUP won all nine CitCo seats.)
Just two or three months after those December 1971 CitCo elections, Dean Lindo began to defend UBAD leaders in a bunch of Magistrate’s Court cases and a Supreme Court trial, and he did so pro bono. These cases lasted from February or March of 1972 until October of 1972. By October, the events of 1973 clearly establish, Dean Lindo had gained traction within UBAD, and he was able to divide the UBAD leadership,
The December 1971 CitCo elections marked the end of Philip Goldson as Maximum Leader of the Opposition. (Mr. Goldson went to London in January of 1972 to begin studying law.) Lindo had challenged him for leadership of the NIP around May of 1969, and then formed the PDM when Goldson defeated his challenge. When Mr. Price announced general elections in November that year, Goldson and Lindo had to bring their NIP and PDM together to form an NIPDM coalition. They were badly beaten in December of 1969, only Goldson winning his seat in Albert.
The NIP and the PDM then separated again. (The triumphant PUP attacked UBAD with sedition arrests.) Around September or October of 1971, Mr. Goldson, in desperation, approached UBAD for support in contesting the December 1971 CitCo elections. Dean Lindo, to repeat, boycotted those elections.
In the immediate aftermath of those elections, to repeat, he began to defend various UBAD leaders in court free of cost. So that, when he began to put together the new UDP in 1973, half of the UBAD leadership went along with him.
At the same time in 1973, Lindo achieved something which Mr. Goldson had never been able to do. He succeeded in dividing Belize’s Roman Catholic vote, which Mr. Price had hitherto absolutely dominated, when he brought the newly formed Liberal Party into the UDP.
The history has some relevance where present day UDP politics is concerned, Mr. Lindo recently was featured in a television advertisement supporting Santi Castillo in the UDP Caribbean Shores constituency convention scheduled for this coming Sunday, December 4. The fact of the matter is that the mother of Santi’s main rival, Chandra Nisbet Cansino, had challenged Lindo in his established UDP Fort George constituency in 1989. So, the Santi endorsement may be viewed as payback.
More than that, a Santi victory would surely increase Mr. Lindo’s leverage in the ruling party. That leverage should not be taken lightly. Mr. Lindo recently was so sure of himself that he took out a committal warrant on a UDP Cabinet Minister who owed him money. The Minister paid. We’ll see what happens on Sunday.