by Colin Hyde
Not one, not two, three candidates on the UDP ticket carried some extra weight on their backs in the March 12 general election. While only the voters can say what was on their minds when they went to cast their ballots in Belmopan, Collet, and Mesopotamia, there is no doubt that the burdens didn’t help, and quite likely they played a major part in the defeats. Yes, they all lost.
Starting with Shyne Barrow, the aspirant in Mesopotamia who went into the 2025 election as the incumbent, he was deported from the US after serving time in a US prison because of his involvement in a shooting at a New York nightclub. At the time of the shooting, he was a young rising star in the Hip Hop industry, and he was at a club with his mentor/manager.
Shyne had detractors in the UDP, and their talk was that he was dictatorial, and abrasive. In respect to the latter, personality issues, they are especially important when you are on a team, when you are involved with people who have to interact closely and pull for each other. It might have been convenient for his detractors to keep the focus on those areas, to escape from having to deal with the incident in New York, which spilled over from a hooligan situation. They might have been hesitant to zero in on that for fear of being labeled unforgiving. But someone with such a stain winning a seat is a rarity; and becoming prime minister, well, that is way out there.
Shyne has a smooth tongue, and that is always a plus in politics; but some of his positions on the international scene don’t resonate with any political party in our country. In discussing world affairs and the issues that mattered at home, he often sounded like someone who had been on a crash course, not someone talking about things he grasped fully. Personality and greenness might be glossed over with money and chats. The baggage from New York was pretty heavy for the job he aspired for.
In Collet, Patrick Faber got a lot of flak for spats with women in his life. There are men who think it normal behavior to get into word wars with women. There are men who would never quarrel with a woman. There’s a line no man should ever cross. Faber did, more than once. Man to man, his lapses barely amount to misdemeanors; man to woman, they are kryptonite. Pulling the hair of girlfriends, anything physical, is unacceptable behavior, and he had to step down as leader of the UDP. He’s reportedly been in anger management classes, and there have been no reported lapses since the incident that his leadership couldn’t withstand.
I must note that the worst Faber could have been charged with in court for his lapses was “misdemeanor”, and the parties that got him “riled” up, not likely being 100% innocent, in court they probably would have asked the judge to throw out the case/s. Of course, exoneration from the courts doesn’t give you a pass in politics.
Another story out there to explain the defeat of the formerly invincible Faber is that the PUP threw a lot of money behind their candidate. It is very concerning, where the PUP gets all its money from. Do they have big donors to whom they owe favors? I hope it’s not from our treasury. Even with the kryptonite baggage and the PUP money against him, Faber could have escaped with a victory in his division. The boulder that broke his back was put there by Shyne, who took over leadership when he stepped down.
A default choice, Shyne, instead of buying gifts for Faber, drew a page from the Machiavelli book and demanded fealty, demanded that Faber kiss his ring. Faber couldn’t, and Shyne set out to destroy him. From the day Faber stepped down as leader, it was up and down for him in Collet—today the candidate in the division, tomorrow persona non grata in the party. That wore Faber down. I’ve heard that Faber is no altar boy, but I’ve never heard that he was sticky with our treasury.
John Saldivar’s Chappaquiddick is the murder of Pastor Llewellyn “Lew” Lucas. John was suspended for a week in 2016 after his name was associated with Mason, the prime suspect in the horrific crime. The party was satisfied that John’s hands were clean, so much so that they chose him to be the leader of the UDP after Dean Barrow stepped down. And when he was forced to give up the title, it was due to his association with a different philistine, Dermin, who ended up in jail for a different kind of crime.
Forget the US government designating John a malcontent, the people of Belmopan won’t damn him forever for accepting the felon’s donations. Remember the PUP used to take money from Guatemala. They can argue that it was for a good cause, our liberation from colonialism, and that it was from a good president, Jacobo Arbenz. John said he didn’t know Dermin was a crook, and that he used the money he got to fund his sports clubs. John has not yet explained how he got the Dermin tranches to Belize. I guess a man who was handling the country’s millions in his ministry saw the Dermin thousands as petty cash.
Politics can be very dirty. During the recent election campaign, when things got heated in the divided UDP camp, Shyne and one of his major propagandists seemed to hint at the connection between John and Mason. Looking at the bare facts of that matter, a couple years prior to the murder Mason was a joint sponsor of John’s football club. A very credible source told me that Pastor Lew wasn’t happy with Minister John because he had preferred a family member of the pastor in a difference over a property. But we know that every day of the week people are unhappy with government ministers.
It so happened that, due to a very different kind of matter, Pastor Lew was also unhappy with Mason, who the court has determined is a very dangerous man. There is a charge against Mason that on May 31, 2016, he kidnapped a Mennonite couple he had had business dealings with. News reports say that in mid-July, 2016, Pastor Lew, accompanied by a European man and another pastor, went to Mason’s house to collect some money Lew said Mason owed him. The European and the other pastor were bound with duct tape by someone, and later released. And Pastor Lew was murdered.
You know that in this life even a newborn can get smeared. You’ve heard of baby weh baan wid kaal and the superstitions, evil-spirits thing that go with that. John said he had ended his relationship with Mason many months before the murder, after he recognized that Mason was unsavory company. Because people can be cynical, because he had been a business associate and apparently a friend of the man who was convicted of a terrible crime, that incident will continue to dog John like Chappaquiddick dimmed the future of Ted Kennedy.
The cases are different; the clouds they cast are not. In the Chappaquiddick story, Ted Kennedy, (the younger brother of JFK, the assassinated US president, and RFK, the US senator who was the favorite to win the US presidency when he was murdered in 1968), was at a function in 1969 which was attended by a young woman who had been a part of the RFK team. Later that night, Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, and the young woman drowned. It took Ted around ten hours to report what happened.
Ted told the American people that he couldn’t explain his irrational behavior. He said he wasn’t drunk and that he and the young woman weren’t in a sexual relationship. He said he had tried to rescue the girl, but couldn’t. The court didn’t punish Ted, and Massachusetts would return him to the US Senate in every election. But he never got to run for president, despite being as formidable as any in the US’s political field.