“The Alliance for Progress was based on the supposed appeal the idea of America held for the world. Kennedy offered money – upward of ten billion dollars – but little of it was forthcoming, except the portion that went to build the network of death-squad paramilitaries. JFK believed he could ‘awaken the American revolution’ in the Americas while at the same time containing its threat by arming those most opposed to even the mildest goals of such a revolution. But of course he couldn’t. Faced with a choice between containment and change, Washington, as it did in the late 1940s, chose containment. Lyndon B. Johnson and then Richard M. Nixon kept Kennedy’s commitment to counterinsurgent funding. But they tossed out his revolutionary ambitions, as well as the pledge to reform the continent’s ‘ancient institutions that perpetuate privilege.’”
– pg. 49, Empire’s Workshop, by Greg Grandin, Owl Books, New York, 2006
In order to understand better what is going on in Belize with reference to security concerns, you must appreciate that there are no Siegfried or Maginot Lines around Belize. The territory is wide open to penetration, from the west and the south especially.
Another thing you must appreciate is that the dominant foreign policy concern of the United States of America is American companies and American citizens, the protection and success thereof. In World War II (1939-1945), the United States and the Soviet Union ended up as allies of sorts, along with Great Britain. But soon after that war, a so-called Cold War began between the US and the USSR, the main reason being ideological: the Americans were champions of free market capitalism while the USSR had been practicing state communism from the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917.
In Central America, our region of the world, dictatorial regimes began to emerge in the countries around us – Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Salvador, which featured brutal, military rulers. These rulers, many of whom had been trained in American military schools, all proudly waved the flag of anti-communism (and a convenient Christianity), and as a result of doing so, they enjoyed unqualified support in Washington’s State Department and their Pentagon. The masses of the people in these republics, mostly indigenous people, suffered horribly, but to protest for workers’ and peasants’ rights in Central America was to be branded a communist. To be communist meant that Washington absolutely did not care whether the Central American generals kidnapped, tortured or murdered you. Elected in 1960 to the American presidency, John F. Kennedy appeared to think a bit differently from his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In Cuba, an island just 90 miles away from Florida, a general by the name of Fulgencio Bautista with views similar to those of Ubico, Somoza, Castillo Armas and the rest of the generals in Central America, was overthrown by a revolutionary named Fidel Castro in January of 1959. Castro soon declared himself a communist, which meant he began to receive aid and arms from Russia. The United States decided to arm and finance a group of Cuban exiles, who were trained in Guatemala and Nicaragua, to invade Cuba in 1961. The decision to invade had been made in the Eisenhower era. Assuming the presidency, Kennedy found that decision a fait accompli on his desk. Facing the invasion, Fidel did not make the mistake the reformist Jacobo Arbenz had made in 1954 in Guatemala: Castro armed the Cuban people, and he survived the Bay of Pigs.
Right wing and military elements in the United States blamed President John F. Kennedy for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. They said that if Kennedy had provided American air cover for the Cuban exiles, as had been promised, the invasion would have succeeded.
Kennedy made a famous statement, reference Latin America, which may have helped to doom him. He said, “Those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”
Even though he forced the Russians to remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba during the missile crisis in 1962, Kennedy did not support the expansion of the American war effort in Vietnam against the communist North Vietnamese. He was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in November of 1963. The new President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, soon began to escalate the Vietnam War.
The Central American generals, predictably, continued to resist peaceful change, and the violent revolutions which Kennedy predicted, began in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Salvador. In Nicaragua, the revolutionaries won an outright victory in 1979. Revolutionaries have won partial victories of varying importance in the other republics.
The result of the partial dismantling of some of the more violent security elements in the republics around Belize, has been that some of these trained experts in kidnapping, torture and murder have drifted across our porous borders into Belize. Some have found employment in the agricultural industries in the southern parts of Belize, and some have provided the trained, expert muscle for the top narcotics traffickers in Belize.
There is a National Security Council in Belize, but it is a body as secretive as Special Branch. This secrecy is a relic of colonial days, we hereby submit. The people of Belize need to be better informed about the state of security matters in Belize. The ordinary citizen should be made aware of the level at which the game is played when he comes into conflict with certain elements in our society. A lot of Belizeans are, frankly speaking, naïve about security matters, even, perhaps especially, those who are educated in the academic sense. This makes them sitting ducks for the trained experts in kidnapping, torture and murder who move around in Belize, apparently with impunity.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle. Merry Christmas.