“We have to interact to emphasize the view that we are not different from each other; the fact of this artificial border does not make us different. We are still the same people, with the same aspirations and desires.”
– Belize Foreign Minister, Wilfred “Sedi” Elrington, in Washington, D.C., Wed. Dec. 16, 2009
“Again, the devil taketh Him up into an exceeding high mountain, and showeth Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto Him, All these things will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me.”
– MATTHEW, Chapter 4, verses 8, 9
We have a special respect and admiration for the Elrington family, because we have an idea of what the paterfamilias, Peter Elrington, experienced at the hands of George Price and the People’s United Party (PUP) during the 1950s and 1960s. A public officer, Mr. Elrington was repeatedly pushed around by Mr. Price, who was a vicious victimizer in his prime. Mr. Elrington endured the pressure, and gave his children an example of strength and perseverance for them to emulate.
The question is, of course, what is it that Mr. Elrington stood for which provoked victimization by Mr. Price, and, at the same time, what were the positions which Mr. Price was proposing and believed he had to defend. These are delicate subjects to discuss, because the two major political parties have programmed their adherents to hold passionate, even fanatic opinions on these matters.
Mr. Peter Elrington was a strong supporter of Philip Goldson’s National Independence Party (NIP), but the NIP was not established until 1958, when there was a unifying of Herbert Fuller’s National Party (NP) with Goldson’s Honduran Independence Party (HIP). There are reasons to believe that Mr. Peter Elrington would have been a supporter of the pro-British National Party. The National Party was where many respectable British Honduran civil servants took refuge in 1951 after the seemingly ragamuffin PUP emerged in 1950.
It is important to note that in 1951 almost all the civil servants of British Honduras were so-called Creoles. They were middle class, or they had middle class pretensions. The PUP was an urban black party at foundation, but PUP blacks were working class and lumpenproletariat. They resented and rejected the civil servants’ bourgeois attitude and their submissiveness to, yea adulation of, the British colonial masters.
Philip Goldson, who became the hero of the public service element after he took over the NIP in 1962, was a foundation PUP. He served nine months in jail in 1951 because of his PUP beliefs and commitment, and he remained a PUP leader until 1956.
Between 1950 and 1954, the PUP “played ball” with Guatemalan leaders in their search for support to fight British colonialism in Belize. Philip Goldson was a part of this “game playing.” He visited Guatemala in 1951 and described the visit as representing “seven days of freedom.” At what point Mr. Goldson became the hard core anti-Guatemalan nationalist he remained until his passing eight years ago, we cannot definitively say.
The point we want to make in this editorial is this. Sedi Elrington would have been condemned by Philip Goldson, and by Peter Elrington, for making such a statement as he made last week Wednesday. If George Price had make such a statement, he would have been condemned by Philip Goldson, Peter Elrington, and by the Sedi Elrington we knew before he was elected to the House of Representatives in February of 2008. So then, exactly what the hell is going on here?
Mr. Elrington’s statement in Washington on December 16, 2009, was a blatantly inaccurate statement and it reeks of treachery. Guatemalans and Belizeans are not the same people. That is precisely the point of Belize’s fight for self-government, independence, and territorial integrity.
At Amandala, we have been working for many years to inform and educate the Belizean people about who the Guatemalan people are. There are two Guatemalas: one is a neo-European, wealthy, militaristic, First World-type country, while the other Guatemala is indigenous, dirt poor, and a brutal example of Third World poverty.
Sedi Elrington spent his youth accusing George Price of selling out Belize to Guatemala. But Mr. Price led Belize to independence with our borders and territory intact. The statement Wednesday by Belize’s Foreign Minister that the border between Belize and Guatemala is “artificial,” is severely questionable on a Belizean leader’s part in light of the fact that Guatemala has maintained a hostile, aggressive claim to Belizean territory for all of our lifetimes. For whom is Sedi Elrington now working and whose interests was he representing on Wednesday, December 16, 2009, in Washington, D.C.?