When the leaders of Mayan Belizeans in Toledo first brought their case for communal ownership rights to the land they lived on, I supported, with gusto. For years our Mayan brothers and sisters had seen developments that threatened their traditional way of life, and the final straw was when a GOB decided to issue logging rights over thousands of acres in the district. For a time villagers watched helplessly as the loggers destroyed the forest, and then they decided to go to court.

I cheered the ruling by Chief Justice Conteh back in 2007 (2008?), that Santa Cruz and Conejo had established customary land tenure. A couple years later, the decision was extended to most of the other villages where the Maya were the dominant tribe.

In one of my columns, I wrote that had the Maya of Toledo been pastoral, they wouldn’t have needed to go to court. The easiest way to control the land is to fall the bush, put barbed wire around it, and put in livestock. In the old Maya system, they fell the forest, burned it, planted a crop, and then they let the land rest for some years before repeating the cycle. It is not the best way to farm, and our brothers and sisters are gradually shifting to more progressive systems, such as utilizing cover crops, alley cropping, and terracing to conserve the soil and make it yield more sustainably.

We have to wonder if any Chief Justice other than Dr. Abdulai Conteh would have forced the government to come to the table. The UDP had installed a new Chief Justice, Mr. Manuel Sosa, just before the 1998 general elections, and when the PUP won, one of their first acts was to get our country a new Chief Justice. To get their man, they went all the way to Sierra Leone.

A Wikipedia page states that Dr. Conteh was once vice president of Sierra Leone, and he was ousted following a military junta in 1992. He was our Chief Justice from 2000 to 2010, when the UDP did not rehire him. It took an extraordinary man to hand down that judgment. No one has asked Justice Sosa, at least not publicly, what his thoughts were about the ruling.

We know how the red and the blue felt. Said Musa had said about the communal land rights claim that he wouldn’t preside over the Balkanization of Belize. And when the UDP came to power, their lawyers questioned the authenticity of the Maya of Toledo, if they were really from the area, and they had to get a message from the CCJ to get them to respect the ruling. The UDP lost every big case at the CCJ, against the rich man, Ashcroft, and against the cash-poor people of Toledo.

There has been some trouble in implementing the ruling, and to my mind that is because some Mayan leaders are going too far over in favor of an American solution. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was big in the case brought by the Mayan leaders, and I have a sense that some of the lead activists from that group were from the USA. Whether yes or no to that, my sense is that the stumbling block in the process has been the leaders who like the idea of near total autonomy, akin to what’s the rule on reservations in the US. On the rez, all is good to go as long as they respect the basic civil rights and liberties established in the US.

We are so, so different from the US. In that country north of us, the Europeans came like conquistadores and massacred the Native Americans, slaughtered their main food source, the buffalo, took all their best lands, and confined them to land that couldn’t sustain crops. The power structure in the US remains European; all their presidents have been/are Europeans, save for one who is a fifty percenter.

I won’t get into kwaaril here with a few Mestizos/Maya in the north side of our country who try to daub Belize with the same brush. I’ve learned well enough that some people in Belize like to take bullet points and run, so keeping on course, I just want to point out here that the lands in Toledo are some of the most fertile in our country, and beginning with our first native leader, George Price, it has been a parade of Mayan lineage in the big seat in the National Assembly. Looking at our present leader, he could assimilate in Crique Sarco and San Pedro Columbia, no problem.

I know that the person who could make the implementation of the Conteh ruling a completely smooth process doesn’t exist. That’s the way it is with negotiations. I will say to the parties that are not in agreement with the present FPIC that has been settled on that they not forget to keep Belize at heart. In all your deliberations, remember to ask yourselves: Is it good for Belize? We might no longer be the tranquil haven of democracy, thanks to our group of lawyers who don’t prize justice, but we have a rich history, and across the country our love is still strong.

We have a special thing here. I do not like for Belizeans to flat out say that the Conteh ruling was a bad decision. No matter what your views are on the world, you should be able to find some good in turning back the krayzinis of 1492.

I also don’t congratulate Belizeans who throw the baby out with the bath water when they think of the colonizers. There were bad things, for sure, but we cannot completely turn back the time. We have to approach the implementation of the FPIC with an abrazo, not a cold stare. Yes, in negotiations we have to be tough, so we aren’t driven too far off from our position, but if we always keep in mind the greater good for Belize, we will do the right thing. We are not the USA.

A criminal leak

Last week a distraught woman went to the police station and made a statement that her spouse had abused her. Some police officer or officers, or some person who works at the Police Department released the statement the lady made so all the world could see. I haven’t read the statement, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to, because the statement made by the distraught lady wasn’t intended for me.

I’m not questioning either of the parties that were affected by the leak, but there’s a reason why we say there are three sides to a story. It’s not that one side isn’t the flat-out truth. I won’t go on here, because we could go down many roads. I just say, give it a thought, and be sincere.

Leaking information has become common in the government, because government after government has violated the rights of Belizeans to know how their money is being spent. There are times leaders have to be careful or strategic with the release of information. There are sensitive matters. But when it comes to our money and other assets, we should know.

What happened at the Police Department was no common leak. It’s possible the person(s) who leaked that document doesn’t know that they committed a serious violation, if not a criminal act. In releasing a private statement, they were savage, and if there is any excuse for them, it is that in this case the one offended, Patrick, well, he has messed up many times already.

Belize is slipping down, and it is important that we do something about it. I wouldn’t ask for whoever released that statement to be nailed to the stake, because they might be ignorant, but at the least it should be made clear that if it happens again, somebody is going to jail.