BELIZE CITY, Mon. Mar. 21, 2022– The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William and Kate Middleton, arrived in Belize on Saturday to start their week-long Caribbean tour reportedly under the auspices of Queen Elizabeth herself to restrengthen ties with the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth nations. Their itinerary, however, underwent a last-minute reshuffle following a protest staged by the leadership of Indian Creek and some villagers, who told Prince Williams via placards to “land somewhere else.”
“We don’t want them to land in our land; that’s the message that we want to send. They could land anywhere, but not in our land,” the chairman of Indian Creek, Sebastian Shol, said in an interview on 7News.
According to Dionisio Shol, a youth leader from the village, the village’s chairman and alcalde were informed last minute of the visit and were instructed to cut the grass on the village’s football field – which would have been used as the landing site for Prince William’s aircraft and the starting point for his tour of Southern Belize, as well as the first event on the itinerary of the couple’s Caribbean tour. According to Shol, in a village meeting on Thursday, they agreed to stage a protest, not only in response to the disrespect by Belize’s government officials via their late demand to the village leaders, but also because they learned that Prince William is the patron of Flora and Fauna International (FFI), the conservation organization which reportedly owns a disputed 12,000 acres tract of land which the village of Indian Creek is claiming as communal property, used traditionally by the villagers.
During an interview, Dionisio Shol said, “We get to find out that he is a patron of Fauna and Flora International. We, you may know, we were on the media about a month or so ago also regarding information that came to the village saying that now FFI has finished purchasing in the land, so the village was also up in arms, and so now, here comes the patron of our [village] and simply put, it, the village is asking, you know, what does a patron mean? Somebody, who is for us, it’s simply somebody who is sending the money paying for the people who are restricting our access to the land, so that is why his name comes into a bigger picture in our village where he is a patron of FFI, and we have an issue….so it’s really with the leadership and him being a patron of FFI.”
The patronage of FFI has long been held by the Royal Family, with King George VI being appointed the first royal patron in 1937. Prince William recently replaced Queen Elizabeth II in that role in October of 2020.
Boden Creek, a dense rainforest area near the village, has been used traditionally by the residents of the village, said their area representative, Minister Oscar Requeña, but he noted that the land is privately owned.
“They are lands that they have been using for farming, lands where they go in and hunt, lands where you know, they go and get materials to build their homes, and certainly, as you are aware, it’s a large tract of land; I think it’s about [13,000] acres of land, and the community is very much concerned that that’s where they do their livelihood. I must clarify, though, that my understanding is that it is private land,” Minister Oscar Requeña said.
Minister Requeña recommended that the parties come together and reach some compromise, since the need for more land in the community, currently consisting of about 800 residents, is constantly increasing.
FFI’s country representative, Lisel Alamilla, who is incidentally also the former Chairperson of the Maya Land Rights Commission, told Jules Vasquez in an Uncut interview last year that the community and government would likely have to engage in a process which could include taking the matter to court to get back the land from FFI.
“One of the first things that you probably would do is you would approach the landowner and say, ‘we agree with the villagers of Indian Creek that this land should be recovered and returned to them. And so, we want to ask you if you would take another piece of land of the same value or size somewhere else in the country.’ And the person might agree, the owner. If the person doesn’t agree, then you can say, ‘well, we wanna purchase the land from you. We’ll pay you for the value of the land’, and the owner can say, ‘No, I don’t want to get rid of the land’. Government has to take that owner to court. There has to be a process to extinguish that owner’s rights. This consent order tells you that Maya customary land tenure exists in the Toledo District, but it doesn’t prescribe how those lands are going to be recovered. With Boden Creek, this is private land, and until you get to the point where you’re going to start addressing the issues of private land, this land is protected,” Alamilla stated.
The international wildlife organization, by all accounts the oldest in the world, has a donation page active on its website calling for “urgent funds” to “save Boden Creek”.
“Your donation today will help protect Boden Creek – forever. A vital expanse of virtually untouched rainforest in Belize, Boden Creek is home to jaguars, monkeys, ocelots and hundreds of other species. But even more importantly, areas like this urgently need our protection,” the website’s donation page states.
It must be noted that the protection of biodiversity and wildlife in Boden Creek is vital to the overall protection of a critical forest corridor in Central America. This corridor has been traditionally sustained for generations by the indigenous peoples living in the area, but a key portion of this area became private property in 1998. According to oneearth.org, a website where donations are being sought to buy the land, the area was partially abandoned in 2021, “leading to the poaching of timber and wildlife from the private reserve, as well as the destruction of infrastructure due to conflicts between the former manager and adjacent communities.”
The need for an inclusive implementation of a Free, Prior, Informed Consent (FPIC) protocol, which corrects the issue of non-consensual private ownership of indigenous communal lands is highlighted in the protest staged on Friday by the Indian Creek residents against the arrival of FFI’s patron, Prince William.
Also, in protest of the arrival, the UBAD Education Foundation (UEF) released a scathing statement calling the visit of the “British colonizers an atrocity to our Afrikan Ancestors, and Afrikan people living in Belize!” UEF stated that Belize and the other Caribbean nations are being deemed “realms of the British monarchy” that to this day have mere “flag independence”.
UEF chairperson, Yaya Marin Coleman, stated in a recent interview, “Our African ancestors are here with us today. We will not be moved, we are still here, and respect to the indigenous people in southern Belize who are also resisting those oppressors coming back.”
Prince William and Kate Middleton’s trip to Belize ends tomorrow, but they have so far met with the Prime Minister, Hon. John Briceño, and his wife; and visited Che’il Cacao Farm and Chocolate Factory, where they ate fresh cacao, and Hopkins Village, where they enjoyed Garifuna cuisine and danced with the locals.
The charm offensive at the behest of Her Majesty the Queen comes as she marks 70 years on the throne, and as conversations on reparations, the atrocities of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and its benefit to the British crown, and the Industrial Revolution are being revitalized throughout the region. Last November, Barbados, a nation historically used as a sugar cash hub for the English, completed its transformation into a republic. The Government of Belize has itself introduced legislation forwarding CARICOM’s reparation’s mandate, to seek admission of the historical wrongs committed against the people of the region, and an apology from the former colonial masters, before starting the conversation of reparations. The UK has never admitted to its historical role in the genocide of African and Indigenous peoples of the New World.
Today, a group of Jamaican business leaders, doctors, and politicians, known as the Advocates Network, penned an open letter preceding the royal couple’s arrival in that country on the second leg of their Caribbean tour. An excerpt from the letter states, “We see no reason to celebrate 70 years of the ascension of your grandmother to the British throne because her leadership, and that of her predecessors, has perpetuated the greatest human rights tragedy in the history of humankind.”
The group has begun a campaign called “60 reasons to Apologize” with a slogan that states, “seh yuh sorry and make Reparation “. We will continue to follow.