“August (Alberto) told us that Dougal (Dean), Rivera and his girlfriend went to a nightclub in town earlier on Saturday night, where they encountered Donicio ‘Life’ Salazar, who previously was convicted on a murder charge in 2006 for the death of Alberto’s son and Dean’s nephew, Rodney August, 22, but won on appeal in the Court of Appeal and was then acquitted in a retrial.
“Salazar, however, was wanted on a warrant in connection with this charge after the DPP appealed the second result.”
– pg. 3, Amandala story by Aaron Humes, Wednesday, June 16, 2010
In the population center and capital of British Honduras, known as Belize in the old days, the mind set of the natives may have been described as colonial innocence, in many respects. The power of the colonial masters was crushing, and their administrative machinery became practically hallowed in the first half of the twentieth century. If we believed that all men were created equal, then we understood that there was something inherently unjust about colonialism. But if our spirits had been systematically beaten down into colonial innocence, then we accepted the colonial order of things as at least peaceful, perhaps even inevitable.
Those of our people who practiced personal integrity in the colonial days, how much of that derived from colonial innocence, and how much of it really arose from a deep-rooted honesty? These are questions for discussion, the reason being that what has happened since self-government in 1964, and especially since independence in 1981, begs the question – were we Belizeans always dishonest and just waiting for the opportunity to display and practice our cynicism?
The discussion is most important with respect to the justice system in Belize. In colonial times, the British protected the “justice” they were dispensing in their colonies with a draconian contempt of court law. If you said or wrote anything about the colonial justice system which suggested you did not accept its integrity with a hook, line and sinker kind of faith, then you were marched off to jail. So that, there was a societal memory involved which obviously intimidated the Belizean people when they began to watch the judiciary become corrupted in Belize. Perhaps, it was simply incredulity. At the time when Belize reached self-government, we had believed in the apparatus of the justice system. In fact, we held lawyers, who are called “officers of the court,” in very high esteem. This began to change after self-government. But, the change was essentially imperceptible.
It is perhaps important to note that after self-government in 1964, the British retained control of the police – the ground beams of the justice system. The Commissioner of Police remained a British expatriate until a Belizean was first appointed ComPol in 1969. And the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court remained British for a long time after that.
The people who are most responsible for the corruption of the justice system in Belize are the lawyers. (You are a lawyer before you are a judge.) How much of this can be blamed on their involvement in political parties and electoral politics, is a good question. And how much of the responsibility for judicial corruption accrues to us, the people, is another good question. The lawyers could not have corrupted the jury system if we, the people, had possessed a stern integrity. At the same time, the Belizean people had originally looked up to lawyers as paragons of rectitude. It wasn’t the people who corrupted the lawyers: it was the lawyers who corrupted the people.
The colonial innocence of the Belizean people has become a sovereign cynicism. If there was a bridge of integrity we ran over in crossing from innocence to cynicism, it is a bridge that has been burned. The Belizean lawyers became too quick to utilize their special knowledge and skills for skullduggery. This began to happen during self-government. They got away with chicanery so often that chicanery became a way of life in legal circles. If you were not a practitioner of chicanery, then you were not “with it” as a lawyer.
It was only a small step from cynical chicanery to criminal collusion. And the lawyers always came out smelling like roses. In the latter part of the 1970s, the lawyers, in their everyday conversations and socializings, began to ignore the blue and red politics with which the masses were absorbed. The lawyers went green, and this green was not environmental. It was strictly financial – money, money, money …
In Belize today, there is a lot of money, but there is very, very little integrity. The people who behaved with integrity, ended up poor. The multimillionaires are those who bent the rules to suit themselves. This is the lesson which the masses of the Belizean people have learned since self-government. No one is innocent any more. Very few have integrity. Everyone wants to get rich, and the way to riches is through chicanery. The lawyers taught us that. Thus endeth the lesson.