32.8 C
Belize City
Thursday, March 28, 2024

World Down Syndrome Day

Photo: Students and staff of Stella Maris...

BPD awards 3 officers with Women Police of the Year

Photo: (l-r) Myrna Pena, Carmella Cacho, and...

Suicide on the rise!

Photo: Iveth Quintanilla, Mental Health Coordinator by Charles...

Goldson, Guatemala and oil

EditorialGoldson, Guatemala and oil
If the “big boys” in the oil world discovered petroleum in British Honduras in the mid-1950’s (or before), it explains a lot of what has happened in the settlement of Belize since that time.
 
The fact that the Belize oil deposits are involved, so to speak, with related deposits in neighbouring Peten (Guatemala) and neighbouring Chiapas (Mexico), complicates matters. But the biggest complication of all is the Guatemalan claim to Belize. Oil people prefer to do business in regions which are stable and peaceful. With respect to Belize, Guatemala has been noisy, militant, and potentially aggressive.
 
Major initiatives to settle the Guatemalan claim began, it may be said, with the 1962 conference in Puerto Rico. The Guatemalan president who behaved most aggressively with respect to the Belize issue was Ydigoras Fuentes, who was in office during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Fuentes wrote on the Belize issue, claiming, most notably, that U.S. president John F. Kennedy had promised in 1961 to support Guatemala’s claim to Belize in return for Guatemala’s allowing Cuban exiles to train on a coffee plantation there. (Those Cuban exiles tried to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro in the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.)
 
Something very significant happened in British Honduran politics sometime between 1958 and 1960. Belize’s most powerful lawyer, W. Harrison Courtenay, and Belize’s most powerful politician, George Cadle Price, reached an agreement which resulted in Courtenay’s being appointed the colony’s first Speaker of the House in 1961. But W. H. Courtenay had led the pro-British National Party (NP) in the early 1950’s, and he could therefore have been considered the leading enemy of the anti-colonial People’s United Party (PUP) during that era.
 
Whereas NIP Leader Philip Goldson was not invited to the Puerto Rico conference, Speaker Courtenay was. At what point Speaker Courtenay’s law firm, W. H. Courtenay & Co., became the lawyers for Ariel and Ajax, the two oil prospecting companies which emerged most prominently here in the middle 1960’s, we cannot say. (One presumes Ariel and Ajax were fronts for “bigger boys.”)
 
After Puerto Rico, some important things happened. First, it was decided in 1963 that the school year in the colony should be changed to coincide with the school year in the United States. In 1964, British Honduras was granted internal self-government, and soon after that the United States began foreign aid programs for Belize.
 
The year before Puerto Rico, perhaps the most important thing that happened in those murky early 1960’s, was the decision by the United States to allow all Belizeans who had relatives in the U.S. to travel there as Hurricane Hattie refugees. This Washington decision was the single development which began the dramatic demographic change in the colony. Hattie-connected migration began the mass exodus of black Belizeans which changed the black majority British Honduras of the 1960’s to the Latin majority Belize of the 1980’s.
 
Four years after the Puerto Rico conference, a top secret conference was chaired by an American Wall Street lawyer named Bethuel Webster. The proposals coming out of that conference were so alarming to Philip Goldson, that he broke the oath sworn by conference participants and revealed what he could remember of the proposals to the people of Belize. These were the Thirteen Proposals of 1966. There were uprisings in the old capital.
 
But Webster’s Proposals were, seemingly, etched in stone where the British and the Americans were concerned. They ignored Goldson and the urban violence sparked by the Thirteen Proposals in Belize, and released the proposals officially in early 1968 as the Seventeen Proposals. The old capital, predictably, exploded. Premier George Price claimed he could not understand the Seventeen Proposals.
 
Essentially, the Seventeen Proposals confirmed Philip Goldson’s status as a Belizean national hero, but a little more than a year after Webster’s Proposals were officially released, Goldson was challenged for leadership of the Opposition National Independence Party.
 
The mystery which has never been solved is where that decision was made, and who made it, to remove Goldson. For sure, that decision was not made by the masses of the Belizean people. Goldson’s national hero status in 1969 derived from his stance on the Guatemalan claim. Goldson’s stance was a hard line, Belizean nationalist, anti-Guatemalan stance. This was not what the oil people wanted. It was not what London and Washington wanted. What they wanted, were the Seventeen Proposals.
 
From a long time ago, it appears in hindsight, it was the oil against the people in Belize. In 2008, the latest incarnation of Bethuel Webster is the International Court of Justice. After the Seventeen Proposals, the Heads of Agreement, the Maritime Areas Act, and the Ramphal-Reichler Proposals, you can’t blame the Belizean people for being suspicious in the extreme.
 
All power to the people.

Check out our other content

World Down Syndrome Day

Suicide on the rise!

Check out other tags:

International