Leadership issues, specifically who gets the top job, have dominated news coming out of the main opposition party, the UDP, ever since the party’s leader, three-term Prime Minister Dean Barrow, had to be replaced for the 2020 general election. One of the few constitutional reforms enacted by the UDP during their 13-year reign, limiting prime ministers to a maximum of three terms, meant that, had D. Barrow remained in electoral politics, he could not ascend to that highest office. He chose to retire.
UDP mouthpieces say it’s nothing unusual for political parties to experience turmoil at the top while they’re in opposition, and point to the most recent example, the present party in government, PUP, which had leadership troubles during much of the UDP’s 2008-2020 reign. The UDP’s mouthpieces are on point when they say the now seemingly “all for one, one for all” PUP went through some struggles before settling on a leader. But they stop at explaining the issues involved in these leadership wars. When the elephants in the PUP squared off, the matter was primarily ideological. With the UDP, it is mainly about personalities.
The PUP’s leadership troubles didn’t wait until they were turned out of office in 2008. Several leaders in the 1998-2008 PUP resisted the party’s shift from George Price’s “mixed economy” to wholesale privatization of public assets – water, telecommunications, electricity, port facilities, and others. The PUP’s explanation for the sales was that the private sector was more efficient than government, and that the previous government had left bare coffers and they needed funds to invest in education and health care. When the PUP imploded it was divided over staying the privatization course and a return to roots. In the end, the party settled on a leader who had a foot in both camps.
The present UDP has no such ideological crisis. When two university-trained economists, John Saldivar and Patrick Faber, faced off in two leadership conventions at the Belize Civic Center in 2020, those events were straight popularity contests. If either of them had ideas of governance that differed from the D. Barrow model they had served for 13 years, they kept it under wraps. In 2024, the brouhaha in the UDP still isn’t over ideology. If any of the party’s leaders condemn the present leader, Hon. Shyne Barrow, for his open embrace of Israel despite its naked expansionism and genocidal war in Gaza, and his non-support of Cuba, they haven’t said so. The embrace of Waterloo which wasn’t approved by the National Environmental Appraisal Committee; the promotion of Vulcan, another project which environmentalists warned presented serious environmental concerns; and protection of the unnamed former owners of the national lottery, are all right-wing policies which none of the party’s leaders decry.
The UDP’s “personalities” war
At this weekend’s National Party Council meeting at BelChina in Belize City, it appears the leader of the UDP, Shyne Barrow, and his supporters would like the agenda to be confined to a post-mortem of the recent blowout loss in Toledo East in the bye-election, and to general party business. But a challenge to the leader of the party, for him to step down, might have to be dealt with.
Both Patrick Faber and John Saldivar, former three-term ministers of government who had been in the UDP hierarchy for over two decades, have had a grip on leadership but couldn’t hold on to it. The tenure of Saldivar, the party’s first choice, came while D. Barrow was still the Prime Minister, and it didn’t last a week. There was euphoria in his camp on February 9, 2020, when he whipped Faber 342 to 227 at a leadership convention and became the leader designate, and anguish days later when he vacated the position under pressure from PM Barrow, who was under pressure from somewhere. That “somewhere”, the US State Department, emerged on November 15, 2022 when it announced in bold the “Designation of Former Belizean Minister John Birchman Saldivar for Involvement in Significant Corruption.” Saldivar’s apparent corruption involved his association with an American felon, Lev Dermen. Saldivar maintains that he only took money from Dermen to sponsor his sports clubs.
Faber’s run, substantially longer, lasted long enough to see him lead the party to election defeats in the 2020 general election and the 2021 municipal elections. Faber’s star crashed to the ground after separate incidents of misconduct with women. Faber’s crimes, both caught on the ubiquitous camera, include hurling himself feet first at a door behind which a woman had barricaded herself to evade his company, and muscling and pulling the hair of another. While his excesses didn’t endanger the life of any of his female friends, he crossed a line in Belize, a country that is intolerant of such behavior.
After Faber and Saldivar (F & S), long-time friends and adversaries, fell from grace, there was a vacuum, and their ally, Hon. Tracy Panton, had an opportunity to become party leader, but she was reluctant, and Shyne Barrow, who is a son of Dean Barrow, seized the moment and snatched the prize. Shyne Barrow can empathize with F & S because he knows the high of reaching the prize, and the agony of seeing it fall away. He had attained some fame as a poet in the hip hop genre in the US, but he fell to ignominy when he was found guilty of shooting and injuring patrons in a nightclub in New York. Deported after his release from prison in the US, when he landed in Belize he was cushioned, first by being made Musical Ambassador by his father, then by being handed the job of UDP standard bearer in the Mesopotamia Division by his uncle, Michael Finnegan, a six-time representative for the area who was retiring from electoral politics.
For F & S, Shyne Barrow is no phoenix out of the ashes to rescue the UDP. He is a usurper, a Johnny-come-lately whose best role was as surrogate of his father, to act as a go-between, a mender of fences between the legitimate camps. For those legitimate camps, Shyne Barrow has what is theirs through seniority, capacity and sacrifice; and the rivals, while watching each other with one eye, both have their other eye on wresting the crown from the imposter’s head.
When their luck was at its worst, F & S have turned to Ms. Panton, to go after the crown. In March 2022 Panton had gathered her forces and mounted a challenge, but lost in a leadership convention at Henry Young’s Bird’s Isle, 257 votes to 254, to the by then well-consolidated Shyne Barrow. Notably, at that critical leadership faceoff, Faber was out of the country, in the US, the Amandala reported, “wrapping up family affairs following the death and interment of his oldest brother.”
F & S saw an opportunity after the UDP’s recent blowout loss in the Toledo East bye-election. After a call for “general reform” of the party from Earl Trapp, the mayor of San Ignacio/Santa Elena, the only municipality where the UDP has a majority, the ambitions of F & S spilled over. Once again, they hope to launch Panton at the top spot.
Intriguingly, it’s the extremely well-financed Shyne Barrow who might have baited this latest eruption in the UDP’s leadership war. After the debacle in Toledo East he told 7 News that he liked the candidate they put up, Dennis Williams, but the brother wasn’t his choice.