“In one of my articles to a local paper a few years ago, I told the Belizean people that Guatemala will never give up its claim to Belize until judgement day. I will tell you why.
“In Guatemala, all of the Guatemalan school maps show Belize as a province of Guatemala. But there is a much bigger map of Guatemala on the palace grounds in Guatemala City. This map occupies about an acre of ground. Belize is included on this map of Guatemala, all the way up to the New River in Orange Walk District. It is there for anyone to see.”
– pg. 106, TOLEDO RECOLLECTIONS, by Bismark Ranguy, Sr., National Library Service, 1999.
“In 1955 the Guatemalan government was planning an invasion to take Belize. Guatemalan soldiers were already in the Peten area of Guatemala moving towards Benque Viejo. The British Ambassador in Guatemala City notified the Foreign Office in London of what was happening.”
– pg. 107, ibid.
“In 1975, the Guatemalans were planning yet another such strategy. They were mobilizing one million men to invade Belize through Benque Viejo using just their bare hands. But the hand of fate intervened. During the month of February in 1976, two days before they were to embark on this trip a terrible earthquake struck Guatemala.”
– ibid.
The discovery and pumping of oil in Belize increase the already great value of the territory, and therefore make the issue an even more important one for the ruling classes of Guatemala and their blood-drenched military.
In Belize itself, however, the Belizean people have been lulled into the proverbial sense of false security. This is especially so in the case of the post-independence, post-television generation of Belizeans, who have little idea of what the Guatemalan issue entails.
If you tell younger Belizeans that a Guatemalan named Francisco Sagastume actually invaded British Honduras through Toledo in 1961 with a small group of men, hoping to spark an uprising against the British, they would look at you with a puzzled look. In Belize, Sagastume went down as a crazy man, but when he returned to Guatemala after serving only one year of a ten-year prison sentence in Her Majesty’s Prison in Belize, he was given a hero’s welcome, according to Ranguy. Sagastume was later elected to the Guatemalan congress.
There was nothing crazy about Francisco Sagastume. And there is nothing crazy about those Guatemalans who have illegally planted their roots in Santa Rosa on the Belize side of the border. But there is something naïve about those Belizeans who do not wish to consider how serious this whole issue is.
The reason this issue is so dangerous is because of the ethnicity involved. Guatemala is like an apartheid state, where the majority indigenous (“Indian”) population is ruled by a minority, neo-European upper class. The bone in the throat of the “white” Guatemalan ruling classes is the fact that Belize is black. They blame the British for planting blacks in the Belize territory and creating a black state next to them. The fact that the Guatemalans can’t do anything to the British, makes them hate us blacks across the border even more. Remember, these are people who despise their own indigenous majority. You have to believe they despise Belizean “morenos” even more. And they consider the whole population here as “black.”
There was a regional incident in October of 1937 called “The Parsley Massacre.” Haiti and the Dominican Republic are neighboring states on the one Caribbean island called Hispaniola. Haiti is black. The Dominican Republic considers itself white. In 1937 the Dominican Republic, under the dictator Rafael Trujillo, murdered between eight to twenty thousand Haitians in the Dominican Republic in a pogrom which has to be considered a racial purge.
We do not seek to alarm Belizeans. This is not even possible. Belizeans have been on a “high” since independence where they consider themselves safe from Guatemala. This is a false security orchestrated by the two major political parties – the PUP and the UDP, in tandem. The PUP and the UDP are in the service of the same British and Americans who concocted the Seventeen Proposals (1968), the Heads of Agreement (1981), the Maritime Areas Act (1991), and the Ramphal/Reichler Proposals (2002). The PUP and the UDP are working for the Belizean corporate oligarchy who see the great financial and economic potential in integration of the Guatemalan and Belizean economies.
The national hero Philip Goldson was replaced as Opposition Leader by the UDP in 1973 because it had become obvious to those opposed to the PUP, that emphasis on opposing the Guatemalan claim to Belize was a hindrance to political success in Belize. The PUP had won six consecutive general elections (1951-1969) being soft on Guatemala.
When the UDP was established in 1973, with the specific stipulation that they would downplay the Guatemalan issue, their performance in the 1974 general elections was the most powerful in Opposition history, and alarmed the PUP. The UDP became so inseparable from the PUP where the Guatemalan issue was concerned, the two parties jointly signed the Maritime Areas Act in 1991, and this infamy forced Goldson to abandon the UDP and form NABR.
We bring up this Guatemalan matter today, because the Santa Rosa issue remains a matter of which the masses of the Belizean people are aware. But the UDP does not bring any pressure to bear on the ruling party here. Foreign Minister Lisa Shoman publicly guaranteed in October that the Guatemalans would be evacuated from Santa Rosa by the end of 2007. If what we believe at this newspaper is true, that was hot air Minister Shoman was blowing. Let’s wait and see.